Authors: Gary Giddins
A private joke between Bing and Carlisle surfaces in dialogue leading into “It’s the Natural Thing to Do.” She asks him, “How’s
for a rousing game of backgammon?” Bing ad-libs, “Well, jacks is really my racket, but I’ll pitch in with you.” On
College Humor
Mary grew accustomed to Bing doing his job and leaving the set to pursue other interests. During
Double or Nothing
he casually asked if she played backgammon. “He was all gung ho for playing and on the set all the time,” she recalled. “There
were several years in between the first picture and the next and he had grown up, shall we say. But he hadn’t changed a bit.
He was very nonchalant about everything. He always knew his lines, but it wasn’t like he was playing a part or acting. He
was just there and he did it. He was delightful, never upstaged anyone, though he must have known the tricks of the trade
— like you step back a bit and get your face in and everyone has to look at you. Bing was not like that. He was very generous
and never tried to hog anything. He knew the tricks, but it wasn’t his style.”
40
If he didn’t compete for the camera, he struggled mightily to hold his own against Mary in their backgammon tournament. “It
was a rage then,” she said of the game, “and he wanted to learn it. He asked if I had a board and I said yes and he said,
‘Bring it tomorrow.’ We started to play and he said, ‘Let’s see, what’ll we play for?’ I said, ‘Bing, you don’t even know
how to play the game, now why would you play for money?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s more fun like that.’ We played through the
whole picture and I kept winning and winning and winning. He never went to his dressing room like he used to — it was always,
‘Get the board, come on, let’s play.’ When we finished the
picture, he owed me a good bit of money, a fair amount in those days.”
41
Reluctant to pay up, he persuaded her to play double or nothing until he was in the hole for $1,200. He promised to send
a check but did not. Instead, he arranged for Mary, who was under contract to the Bing Crosby, Inc., talent agency, to star
in
Doctor Rhythm,
which went into production a few months after
Double or Nothing
wrapped.
Bing called and he said, “We’re gonna do it together again,” and I said, “Oh, I’m so pleased.” I said, “You know, I bet I
know why you want me in the picture.” He said, “Why?” I said, “I bet you’re gonna try and get your money back.” And I want
to tell you, we played. And Frank Tuttle was the director and they have pictures of us on the set, you know, with the board
between us and playing away, with Frank looking on. And I kept winning and winning, and finally it was about two weeks before
the picture finished and he said, “Why don’t we play a really good big game?” And I said, “What do you mean by big?” And he
gave me a figure. I said, “Why, Bing you’re out of your mind. I don’t play for that kind of money.” He said, “Whose money
are you playing with?” I said, “Oh, yeah. All right.” So we started with this figure and it was an automatic double game.
We both threw doubles. Then he was doing well, so he doubled it again. And then I thought I could beat him, so I doubled it
again. So it was lot of money. And do you know that he won that game? We never played again.
42
Mary concluded, “He didn’t want to lose. He finally got the money back, he didn’t have to pay me, and he didn’t want to play
again.” One consequence of the time Bing and Mary spent together on the set was the rumor of an affair. Carlisle adamantly
denied a romance, conceding that “there was so much gossip, it was unbelievable.” She thought it was fueled because she accompanied
Bing to Del Mar and to Spokane as part of the
KMH
troupe when he received his degree, though her mother chaperoned her on those occasions. “I bought a mink coat on one picture
and people said, ‘Oh, Bing bought the mink coat,’ which is why I don’t believe anything I read anymore.” Yet the gossip never
made the papers. “You have to remember, Louella Parsons was a good friend because I was a good friend of the Hearsts, and
I would be up at the beach house, the ranch, San Simeon. So Louella is not going to print anything that isn’t nice about me.
And if she heard something, she’d say, ‘Mary, what is this about a coat?’ And
I’d say, ‘Don’t you believe it, I’ll show you the check I paid for it,’ you know, and she’d say, ‘Okay, honey,’ and that was
it. They controlled everything in the press.”
43
The Hearst Editors’ Radio Poll voted
Kraft Music Hall
best musical program and Bing the best male vocalist for 1937. He also reappeared on the Quigley box-office poll for the
second time, ranking after Shirley Temple, Clark Gable, and Robert Taylor.
Bing started 1938 by completing
Doctor Rhythm,
arguably the most peculiar picture he ever made. Though routine enough in plot and variety-show diversions, it was a more
personal project than its immediate predecessors. What began as a hip, funny, and stylish filmmaking party for old friends
was derailed by accidents, infighting, and a capitulation to the sensibilities of southern exhibitors at the expense of Louis
Armstrong. The film survives in a blundered post-release print as a fragmentary curiosity.
Doctor Rhythm
was Bing’s second independent venture with Manny Cohen’s Major Pictures, only this time there was no bidding for distribution.
Paramount would release it under the rubric “Adolph Zukor Presents an Emanuel Cohen Production.”
The comity suggested by the joint billing was entirely cosmetic. Zukor had disdained Cohen for years, ever since he had run
the studio and signed Bing, Mae West, and Gary Cooper to personal contracts. He now saw the opportunity for a showdown. That
was Zukor’s way. A smiling cobra who bided his time before striking, he had taken control of Paramount twenty years earlier
by taking note of the weaknesses of its founder, W. W. Hodkinson, and then using them to turn the board, against him. With
Doctor Rhythm,
he found a way to rid himself of Cohen, whose name would never appear on another feature film. Executive machinations were
of no concern to Bing, however, as he embarked on the venture, surrounding himself with friends and trusted colleagues.
Frank Tuttle was back, working for the first time with cinematographer Charles Lang, who was shooting his fourth Crosby picture.
Tuttle credited Lang with breaking him of his penchant for arty foreground compositions that obscured the background action.
Herb Polesie hired on as associate producer. John Scott Trotter wrote arrangements for a score supervised by Georgie Stoll.
A new team was
configured to write songs, as Johnny Burke joined James Monaco, a veteran composer recently signed to the studio. In his glory
years Monaco had written such enduring ditties as “Row, Row, Row” for
Ziegfeld Follies of 1912,
“You Made Me Love You” for Al Jolson, and “Crazy People” for the Boswell Sisters, but his career had been in eclipse for
several years. Jo Swerling and Richard Connell wrote the script, freely adapted from O. Henry’s uninspired story “The Badge
of Policeman O’Roon.”
As usual, Bing was billed as part of a starring quartet, along with his backgammon adversary Mary Carlisle, fellow horse breeder
Andy Devine, and — in a particular coup and the primary motivation for the entire project — Beatrice Lillie.
44
Bing had admired the outlandish Canadian-born comedienne ever since he saw her in
Charlot’s Revue
in 1926. In the intervening years she had become the darling of the English stage, playing Shaw and Coward, though best known
for turns in comic revues that earned her the accolade “the funniest woman on earth.”
45
Yet her humor was hardly heartland material, and after a dismal vehicle in the early days of sound, she had been ignored
by the film studios.
Wearing her hair in a mannish bob and trilling double entendres while gesticulating with a long cigarette holder, Bea Lillie
combined wordplay, gender confusion, upper-crust parody, and spry physicality for a result that convulsed some and confused
others. For her first picture in eight years (and the only suitable opportunity she would ever have in Hollywood), she was
promised a major production number in addition to one of her trademark numbers, Rodgers and Hart’s “There’s Rhythm in This
Heart of Mine,” and the chance to revive her famous sketch from
At Home Abroad,
in which she orders “a dozen double damask dinner napkins.”
46
Lillie arrived in Los Angeles in late September, appeared on
Kraft Music Hall,
and posed for
Doctor Rhythm
publicity photos with a horse, after which she thanked the photographer and his assistant and then turned to the horse and
said, “Thank you, too, you walleyed son of a bitch.”
47
Louis Armstrong was also signed. After
Pennies from Heaven
he had appeared for Paramount in the Jack Benny comedy
Artists
&
Models
and in Manny Cohen’s unsuccessful Mae West film,
Every Day’s a Holiday.
Now he was back with Bing, purportedly in a more ambitious role, with two musical numbers and dialogue scenes, generating
much publicity. Joe Glaser, Armstrong’s manager, told the
Chicago Defender
(a black paper) that Louis would have “an opportunity to work throughout the picture in many scenes with Bing Crosby,”
48
enabling him to “surpass all of his acting in previous films.”
49
That was in September. By October, when the picture went into production, Louis’s role had been greatly reduced; though he
worked two weeks (a glossy still of him and Bing was widely published), he was now limited to one production number, the climactic
performance at a benefit for the police department, described with appalling insensitivity in the Paramount press book:
The number opens with what seems to be a symphony orchestra in silhouette. Symphonic music swells from the screen. The number
ends, the leader turns, bows and leans wearily against a pillar. Then as the light comes up we see that the musicians aren’t
a symphony orchestra at all, but a hot negro dance band, and the leader no Toscanini in black full dress, but a chubby darkie
in a dress suit of silver cloth. He stands there dreamily until someone toots an impatient note at him from the rear, then
he bestirs himself to reality, sighs, raises his trumpet and goes into “The Trumpet Player’s Lament,” which begins,
“I wish that I could play like José Iturbi,
Instead of tootin’ notes into a derby…”
The disconsolate one is Louis Armstrong.
50
The prevalent treatment of black performers in Hollywood musicals involved isolating their numbers so they could be snipped
out when the pictures were distributed in the South. Despite all the publicity attending Armstrong’s participation and the
prominence accorded him in billing and press materials, that option became the fallback remedy for
Doctor Rhythm
— especially after it was understood that Tuttle had shot Louis in front of a racially integrated ensemble. Although MGM
presented the mixed Benny Goodman quartet in
Hollywood Hotel
the year
Doctor Rhythm
was filmed, Tuttle’s decision may have been viewed by the brass as a provocation; the only promotional stills of the sequence
show Louis surrounded by black musicians.
Certainly, Zukor had the southern market on his mind after the brouhaha caused by Louis’s performance in
Artists
&
Models.
Atlanta’s
The Georgian
protested, “Martha Raye, thinly burnt-corked,
does a Harlem specialty with a fat Negro trumpeter and a hundred other Negroes. It is coarse to the point of vulgarity. I
have no objection to Negroes on the screen. I like them from Bill Robinson down the line. Their stuff is usually good. But
I don’t like mixing white folk — and especially a white girl — in their acts.”
51
The managing editor of the
Shreveport Journal
personally wrote Zukor to warn him that any attempt to depict Negroes and whites “in social equality” was offensive and might
generate repercussions.
52
But that issue could wait; there were more pressing backstage problems, ranging from the ludicrous to the lunatic. Bing offered
a small part to his recently acquitted golf friend, John Montague, arguing, “I knew he’d win out, he comes back here with
clean hands and can start over again.”
53
The Hays Office convened a meeting and flaunted its power in barring him from the film. Bing backed off. Then a problem arose
with the title. The working title was that of O. Henry’s story, but as the cameras started to roll, something snappier was
sought, like
Swing Along Ladies
or
Come Along Lady.
One executive proposed
Doctor Rhythm,
to exploit the “reams of publicity printed about Crosby’s doctorate from Gonzaga University.”
54
Knowing Gonzaga might take umbrage, Larry telegrammed Father Sharp to tell him of the suggestion. As Sharp was out of town,
the president, Leo J. Robinson, opened the wire and misread the title as
Doctor of Rhythm.
He wrote Larry, thanking him for directing the matter to the school’s attention, and asked that the degree “not be referred
to in any light manner.” He was primarily irked by a radio burlesque on Fred Allen’s
Town Hall Tonight
in which an actor portraying Robinson — “a cheap and undesirable caricature” — asked Bing for a job in the movies.
55
Larry advised Cohen that Bing would not precipitate a clash with Gonzaga, and the studio relented, not knowing that Bing had
taken the matter in hand with authoritative diplomacy, writing Father Robinson, “Larry has just shown me your letter of recent
date and I am sorry that the undignified reference to the presentation of the degree was made on the
Town Hall Tonight
radio program. This is the type of thing that they generally do on their show…. I don’t think there will be anything more
of this nature, however. At least I hope not, as the ceremony and the honor the degree stands for is much too important to
me to be either caricatured or referred to in the spirit of
levity on the radio or in the newspapers.” Concerning the title, he pointed out that it was
Doctor Rhythm,
a “substantial difference” from
Doctor of Rhythm,
implying no “connection with the ceremony at Gonzaga as the character I play in the picture is a doctor, a general practitioner
in New York.” He noted that the title was not finalized and “if we can think of anything better we will make the change.”
56
That would not be necessary.