Bing Crosby (83 page)

Hawaiian songs combined affecting melodies and the down-home spirituality Bing found in western ballads. The glissandi of
the steel guitar (guitars were always magic for him) complemented his vocal glides; the dilatory tempos exercised his handsome
stalwart timbre. Yet Bing’s affinity for South Seas idylls seemed clouded at the first session. The larghissimo tempo triggered
a vague trembling and self-conscious use of mordents. Kapp immediately scheduled a follow-up, this time recording “South Sea
Island Magic” and “Hawaiian Paradise,” and the improvement is unmistakable; the mordents are natural and the high notes weighted
by a robustness and subtly swinging pulse. “South Sea Island Magic,” the more accomplished performance, sold decently in the
period before “Pennies from Heaven” took over, dominating sales for the rest of the year. With “Hawaiian Paradise,” Bing waved
across the Pacific to its composer, Harry Owens, the bandleader who had auditioned him and Al Rinker at Cafe Lafayette in
1926. A professional since the age of fourteen, Owens had seemed so much more experienced back then, but he was only a year
older than Bing. Now he led the band at Honolulu’s Royal
Hawaiian Hotel, where Bing and Dixie would spend their first evening on the island.

On Sunday, August 30, 1936, two weeks after he returned to the studio with Dixie to record their duets, they boarded the SS
Lurline
for a five-week vacation. When the ship docked at Oahu on September 3, photographers captured Bing at breakfast and, as one
reporter wrote, “shuffl[ing] his way through a jam of shrill flappers who ogled at the nonchalant swing of his 178-lb. body,
the fluttering of his pale blue eyes.”
¹¹
The Crosbys had arranged to stay at a private home at Kaalawai with Lindsay Howard and his wife and other friends.

Like everyone else on the island, Owens was excited about their arrival and wondered whether Bing would remember him. His
doubts were allayed that evening, when Bing strode to the bandstand and said, “Hi, Harry, is this tryout night?”
¹²
He asked the name of the tune the band had just played.

A couple of years earlier, Owens had written a ballad to commemorate the birth of his daughter, Leilani. When he told Bing
the song was called “Sweet Leilani,” Bing made a joke about not being able to pronounce it, but during the course of the evening
he requested the unpronounceable title another five or six times. The following morning Bing phoned Harry to tell him he wanted
the song for his next picture and asked whether he could ride over on a motorbike he had just rented. Harry was overwhelmed
but ambivalent. The song was so personal to him and his family that he was disinclined to commercialize it. He asked Bing
to listen to his other songs, including “Dancing Under the Stars,” “Palace in Paradise,” and “To You, Sweetheart, Aloha,”
all of which Bing eventually recorded. Undeterred, Bing proposed a characteristic solution to Owens’s quandary.

For all his straightforwardness, Bing was in two areas a master of indirection. When it came to the requisite love songs in
his movies, he asked Johnny Burke to avoid the phrase
I love you
in favor of roundabout metaphors (e.g., “You Don’t Have to Know the Language,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “Sunday, Monday or
Always”). When it came to money, he devised intricate ways to be charitable without the appearance of actually giving away
money. These ranged from schemes to allow Gonzaga to participate in a TV show to arranging bit work to making secret bequests.
Indeed, his brother Bob resented him for years for refusing to help his band out of a bind early in his career, only to learn
years later that the man who did help him was
operating under Bing’s instructions. According to Owens, Bing said, “I won’t permit you to commercialize on ‘Sweet Leilani,’”
then offered to set up a trust fund that would collect all royalties for the education of Leilani and any future children
Harry might have.
¹³
They made a test recording the next afternoon. Bing asked Harry to hum the tune so he would not miss any notes. “How fast
he learned,” Owens noted. “Once through and he knew it perfectly.”
¹⁴

The next few weeks were idyllic. Though besieged by fans, he swam, golfed, motorbiked, and tried surfing and motor gliding.
He attended a meeting of Kamaaina Beachcombers’ Hui, a sportsmen’s organization dedicated to promoting swimming in the islands,
and took a sampan from Honolulu to Kaunakakai, where a crowd paraded him through town to the steps of Molokai market. Deeply
moved by the warmth of his reception, he sang “Hawaiian Paradise” and attempted “Na Lei O Hawaii,” though he didn’t know all
the words. He stayed overnight on Molokai and hunted deer the next day.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the film was beginning to take shape as producer Arthur Hornblow Jr. hired Don Hartman and Frank
Butler to write a script, and Eddie Sutherland (Hornblow’s man on
Mississippi)
to direct. Paramount renewed Bing’s contract for another two years, though he had nine months remaining on the old one. Only
five days earlier Bing had played his part in the negotiations by wiring columnist Sheila Graham that he might retire from
the screen with the fulfillment of his present contract;
¹⁵
LeBaron thought Bing wholly capable of doing just that. Whether or not Bing was actually in contact with Hornblow, he did
not inform him of “Sweet Leilani” until his return to the mainland on October 8, at which time he also displayed an expanded
waistline that forced him to accept a stringent liquid diet.

Hornblow, an intelligent and cultured man in private life, was notoriously megalomaniacal on the set. Eddie Sutherland remembered
him issuing pointless edicts, like “Crosby’s got to be here at nine.” “Well, Crosby can get there when he feels like it, you
know,” Sutherland explained. “What are you going to do, keep him after school? Crosby’s a most generous man. He’ll give you
three months to work on a script if you’re not ready, but then he’ll say, ‘I’m not coming in on Saturday, I want to go to
the races.’You say, ‘Fine,’ and you shoot around him. But this man would say, ‘He’s got to be here Saturday.’”
¹⁶
Hornblow’s response to “Sweet Leilani” was an emphatic no. Bing
tried to convince him that the song had proved itself in Hawaii, and showed him a fitting spot for it in the script, to no
avail. He let the matter slide — until shooting began.

Robin and Rainger, who wrote the picture’s score, had been very good to Bing in the past with “Please,” “Love in Bloom,” and
“June in January,” among others. They were in no position to take umbrage at the insertion of a new song, as Rodgers and Hart
did when Bing interposed “Swanee River” in
Mississippi.
Hornblow, on the other hand, remembered that tiff all too well, though he may have forgotten the positive things that came
from Bing’s stubbornness. For Bing, more than a song was at stake; there was the promise to Harry, and his pride in being
able to recognize a winning number. After all, his previous attempts to help struggling tunesmiths had been rewarded with
Carmichael’s “Moonburn,” Mercer’s “I’m an Old Cowhand,” and the score to
Pennies from Heaven.

By the time the picture went into production in December, Horn-blow had replaced Sutherland with Frank Tuttle, who was particularly
enthusiastic about the challenge of creating Waikiki Beach on the Paramount lot, a feat he credited to the “ingenuity of the
set designers and constructors, who built an entire Hawaiian village on one of the sound stages with an amazingly realistic
sky backing.”
¹⁷
Only scenic shots and a chase scene, using doubles, were photographed in Hawaii. While Tuttle busied himself staging the
musical numbers, Bing behaved with customary professionalism, pleased to be surrounded by a cast of amusing friends, including
Bob Burns, Martha Raye, George Barbier, and Grady Sutton, and an appealing and musical leading lady, Shirley Ross.
¹⁸
The filming was almost complete in February, when they came to the sequence where Bing thought “Sweet Leilani” belonged.
He brought it up, and Hornblow refused. Bing told him, “When you change your mind, I’ll be back,” and left to play golf.
¹⁹
He stayed away for two days, until Hornblow relented. After they shot the scene, Bing cabled Hawaii:

DEAR HARRY, I FILMED SWEET LEILANI SEQUENCE TODAY. COME SATURDAY AM RECORDING SONG FOR DECCA. TRUST FUND DOCUMENTS IN MAIL.
THINGS LOOKING UP. BETTER PLAN ON HAVING A DOZEN MORE KEIKIS. ALOHA TO ALL. BING.
²⁰

* * *

Like
Rhythm on the Range, Waikiki Wedding
is an elaboration of
Kraft Music Hall,
though more stylish than the earlier film. Tuttle’s imaginative staging and limber camera are evident from the opening scene,
a long traveling shot magnificently handled by Struss, showing a wedding ceremony and dwelling on the prettiest girls. He
directed the film’s primary song, “Blue Hawaii,” as a duet, in which Bing recites each line of the lyric before Ross blends
her voice with his, to avert the cliché of characters who are “letter perfect in the words of a song when they’ve never had
a chance to learn them.”
²¹
Only in Hollywood would a director aim for realism in presenting a song, when not an ounce of realism pertains anywhere else
in the picture.

The plot requires Bing, playing a press agent, to romance Ross, the winner of a Miss Pineapple Princess competition, in order
to dissuade her from returning to her California home and fiancé before the publicity value of her victory can be fully exploited.
While love sneaks up on him, he contrives to keep her busy with a fake adventure involving hostile islanders; in effect, he
frames a big con, engaging numerous actors to fool his mark. The device is engaging because through much of the picture the
audience is no wiser than Ross, as a preposterous story unfolds, concerning an iconic pearl and a vengeful volcano. We learn
shortly before she does that we have been duped by a scheming publicist who has conjured up a script within the script. After
the fraud is exposed,
Waikiki Wedding
turns shamelessly routine: the leading lady must choose between her society fiancé on the mainland and a recumbent Bing on
his boat.

In one scene Bing is obliged to knock out a tribal chief, played by Anthony Quinn, who recalled, “We were supposed to fight
and I didn’t know much about fighting in pictures. I had fought in the ring, so, I mean, a man is gonna hit me, he hits me.
But Bing hit pretty hard. So I went down. I should have ducked. Then he apologized and that made us wonderful friends.”
²²
Quinn had been working in pictures for less than a year, mostly as an extra or a hood.
Waikiki Wedding
was his first substantial part. Because he was half Mexican and sensitive to studio discrimination, Quinn was gratified by
Bing’s easy tolerance:

Bing was one of the most amazing people in the world because he had worked with so many minorities, and minorities were having
a lot of
trouble in those days, my gosh. And Bing understood, he understood what I must have been going through and he was most helpful
to me, his whole attitude. I always loved him because of the way he treated [people]. There was a shoeshine man at the entrance
to the Paramount gate named Oscar. And Bing was one of his favorites because Bing came in and, I mean, he could talk the talk
and he was wonderful at it. And Oscar and he would laugh, but there was nothing about Bing that was patronizing. He had worked
with Louis and all the great musicians of the time and was used to being with blacks and Mexicans and all kinds of minorities.
So he was actually wonderful to work with and made you at ease, put me at my ease.
²³

For all its polish,
Waikiki Wedding
is a minor period piece, dated by low humor — instead of
Rhythm on the Range’s
bull, the characters have to contend with Burns’s pet pig — and the change-ups between patter and music. Bing holds the fort
as the nominal star, looking youthful and earnest, coming to the fore chiefly in song. The real stars are Struss’s depth-of-field
photography and the songs, primarily “Blue Hawaii,” an ideal vehicle for Bing; the first two phrases are confined to a range
of four notes near middle C, the third leaps upward an octave, where the song remains until it descends for the second eight
bars, and the release is lovely. “In a Little Hula Heaven” (an affable jump tune that Bing recorded swingingly with Jimmy
Dorsey) and “Sweet Is the Word for You” are also effective. The one ineptly staged song is “Sweet Leilani,” obscured by the
squealing of the pig, which at the initial showing in Honolulu so affronted the patrons and composer that the print was angrily
shipped back to Hollywood.

But, as Bing soon wired Owens:
HEAR YE, HEAR YE! WAIKIKI WEDDING, AFTER FLOPEROO IN HAWAII, IS SMASH HIT ALL OVER THE USA. ALSO MY DECCA RECORD OF SWEET
LEILANI JUST TOPPED ONE MILLION PLATTERS. SO SMILE MAN
.
²⁴
The reviews were modestly positive and generally out of touch.
Variety
prophesied, “None of the songs here will hit the top performance brackets,” though it thought them deserving of “a minor
play on the air.”
²⁵
Time
dismissed the “pseudo-Hawaiian” ditties but considered the picture a “mild pleasantry,” singling out for praise the pig,
who “steals the show by oinking at suitable moments.”
²⁶
The
New York Times
found it “friendly, inoffensive, reasonably diverting.”
²⁷
Melody Maker,
in England, huffed, “If this is the best that Paramount can do with Crosby, then I seriously
suggest that they loan him permanently to Columbia — the firm which made such a success of
Pennies from Heaven.”
²⁸

The public loved
Waikiki Wedding
—
Variety
declared it socko everywhere, including Europe. In a season when theaters scrambled for patrons, Bing once again filled the
coffers, eliciting trade-paper headlines like
CLEVELAND PEACEFUL EXCEPT FOR CROSBY’S WHAM
$21,500.
²⁹
In three weeks it broke the Los Angeles Paramount’s all-time house record, and then went on to ring up bigger numbers at
its New York adjunct (on a bill with the Eddy Duchin band). The picture’s domestic gross exceeded $1.5 million, ranking it
third in 1937, after two MGM releases,
Maytime
and
The Good Earth.
³⁰
The one other top-ten entry from Paramount was a Gary Cooper vehicle,
The Plainsman.
Beyond that, news at the studio was bleak. Two of its matchless legends departed, diminished by the lilliputians in the Hays
Office: Paramount canceled Mae West; Marlene Dietrich left in dismay. Ordered to reduce his budget of $30 million by a sixth,
William LeBaron informed Zukor and the powers in New York that he preferred to step down and produce independently (an action
he postponed until 1941).