Authors: Gary Giddins
Bing sang all the songs, so the prerecordings were a snap, though they were made in a novel way. He was accompanied solely
by a pianist playing softly. The orchestra dubbed its part onto his playback recordings, Butler recalled, “because Bing ad-libbed
a lot. We had a piano playback that wasn’t very loud, so that the other music would cover it.”
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Butler enjoyed his professionalism: “He was the fastest man that I ever saw in my life with learning a song. He’d get a song,
and come over and say to Johnny Burke, ‘Play it.’ Johnny would play it a couple of times. He’d start humming it, and then
the third time he’d sing it — he’d know it perfectly.”
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He was no less gratified by Bing’s acting: “He did everything you wanted him to do. I never saw such an actor. He’d do it,
and do it very well. The only thing — we always kidded him about wanting to leave his hat on. He never wanted to put that
toupee on.”
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Some exteriors were shot day-for-night between dinner and sunrise, to accommodate Bing’s radio obligations, and one street
scene with seventy-five extras was ruined by unexpected rainfall followed by winds that “blew all rain clouds away but made
recording and photographing impossible.”
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To make up for lost time, they often worked Saturday nights until the small hours. Polesie estimated midway that they would
need forty-two days (six more than scheduled), provided the big production number in the Frying Pan Cafe (“Hang Your Heart
on a Hickory Limb”) went smoothly,
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but a week later two more days were lost when Joan Blondell fell ill during makeup and was hospitalized for “a severe cold
and throat infection “
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— not a total loss, because in her absence the rest of the company could rehearse the musical number. Filming finished March
7, after forty-four shooting days and an overrun of $10,000.
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During the next ten days, the 137½-minute rough cut was edited to eighty-six minutes in time for a successful preview. Even
so, a battle with the censors had to be decided. Joseph Breen had warned against shooting certain bits: “This gag of the baby
wetting its diapers
must be omitted”; “This gag of Danny investigating the baby’s sex must be omitted”; “The following line is suggestive and
must be changed or omitted: ‘This is just like spring practice, but wait till the season starts.’”
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When studio chief Cliff Work informed Breen he would go to the New York board to persuade it — “in the friendliest possible
manner”
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— to allow the baby to wet its diaper, Breen harrumphed in a letter to Will Hays that Universal disregarded his script warnings
and shot offensive scenes, urging him to block the trespass of “what we call, here, toilet gags.”
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In almost every instance Universal prevailed. The picture premiered April 7 in Miami and opened a month later at Radio City
Music Hall — Bing’s debut in New York’s landmark movie theater. As Bing anticipated, it made a meg or two, but Paramount was
probably more envious of the billing than the profits: “Bing Crosby and Joan Blondell in
East Side of Heaven.”
Bing’s usual routine was in no way hindered by the six days per week shooting schedule — a phenomenon no less remarkable for
being absolutely typical. Each week he produced an hour program for
Kraft Music Hall,
requiring his presence at two-hour rehearsals on Wednesdays at 3:30 and seven-and-a-half-hour rehearsals on Thursdays at
11:00, followed at 7:00 by the broadcast, after which he ate at the Universal commissary and worked all night, reporting again
on Friday morning. His
KMH
guests in that month and a half included the usual motley of Hollywood players and concert stars, among them Grete Stuckgold,
Spring Byington, Colonel Snoopnagle, Humphrey Bogart, Nigel Bruce, Emanuel Feuermann, Elizabeth Patterson, Gregor Piatigorsky,
Wayne Morris, Henry Fonda, Ellen Drew, Rose Bampton, Joan Bennett, Joseph Calleia, Lloyd Nolan, Frances Langford, and William
Frawley. Some of his finest singing in the period was heard on radio, including fully realized interpretations of songs he
never recorded, for example Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well” (a new song he offered in two discrete
arrangements) and DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson’s old ditty “Together.” One major change took place at
KMH,
when Paul Taylor’s Choristers concluded their contract with the February 9 show. The program report for February 16 notes,
“Didn’t seem to miss the choir,”
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but the next week a new choir of five debuted, the Music Maids,
KMH
fixtures for the next six years.
Two Music Maids had crossed Bing’s path before. Alice Ludes, married to NBC audio engineer Ed Ludes, was one of the Williams
Sisters, a trio that performed regularly on Bing’s Woodbury show, and Trudy Erwin (who later married Bing’s audio engineer,
Murdo MacKenzie), freelanced in the
Double or Nothing
Singband. Each of the five members was between seventeen and twenty-three when the group was formed early in 1939 by Erwin
and Dottie Mesmer; the others were Denny Wilson and Bobbie Canvin, who soon left to sing with Tommy Dorsey’s band and was
replaced by Trudy’s high-school classmate, Pat Hyatt. They won instant acceptance. Though their popularity on the air did
not translate into much of a recording career beyond a handful of discs with Bing, they appeared in a few movies and on the
soundtracks of a few more. By the time
East Side of Heaven
circulated, they had been on
KMH
for several weeks, and many assumed they were put in the film to capitalize on their radio renown. Actually, they were hired
for the film — their agent was Larry Crosby — before Bing approved them for the program.
“Larry called us one day and said, would we like to audition for some show on NBC,” Trudy Erwin recalled. “So we did ‘Hawaiian
War Chant’ in Studio B at NBC, no accompaniment, nobody onstage, just Larry, ourselves, and the mixer — my husband now, though
we didn’t know each other then, of course.”
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Bing listened to their transcriptions, and a week later Larry called and asked whether they would like to be on
Kraft Music Hall.
They had no idea they were auditioning for Bing. Some nights they were allowed to perform on their own, but mostly they backed
Bing and provided half-chorus interludes for his songs. “It was a lot of fun. Once in a while, he would take us to the Brown
Derby on Vine. He didn’t eat very much, maybe a salad. In those days, he’d have a big breakfast and no dinner, that’s how
he finally took off weight. I never thought he was too heavy, but that’s what he did. Very disciplined, except when he went
wild — in his work, I mean. The most fun was the dress rehearsal that just preceded the show by maybe an hour. He would kid
around and try to break us up and sing the wrong lyrics and just do all kinds of stuff.”
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Bing, who invented monikers for everyone (Murdo MacKenzie was Heathcliff, Johnny Mercer was Verseable), called the Music
Maids the Mice. “I don’t know why he did that,” Trudy said, “maybe because we got in a little circle and talked at rehearsal.”
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Alice Ludes speculated, “Well, the sponsor made cheese.”
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The combined radio and movie work failed to sate Bing’s energy. On his first free Sunday, he took Dixie, the Edmund Lowes,
and Lin Howard to the races and then to Club 17, where the great stuttering comedian Joe Frisco entertained. The picture’s
third weekend coincided with Bing’s third annual pro-am tournament at Rancho Santa Fe. The first in which Bob Hope played,
it is now chiefly remembered for the presence of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the 1932 Olympic gold medalist who became a championship
golfer in the 1940s. At the 1939 Crosby she was accepted as a competitor by mistake; she remains the only woman to have participated
in the tournament. In 1974, when Bing futilely lobbied to permit women pros to play the Crosby on Monterey Peninsula, he recalled
how much Babe had added to the event. (Women were allowed to play as of 1977.) The following Sunday he guest-starred on a
new CBS series,
The Gulf Screen Guild Show,
a popular anthology to which Hollywood stars donated services because fees were given to the Motion Picture Relief Fund.
A few weeks later Bing and Dixie attended a preview of David Butler’s
Kentucky,
his last Fox picture and one close to the director’s heart, as it concerned horse breeders. A photograph of the couple entering
the theater shows Dixie in a sheath gown and fur jacket, smiling, while Bing, in a light overcoat and fedora, mugs, thumbs
at chin and fingers spread to frame his exaggerated grin.
East Side of Heaven
is little remembered today, a victim of MCA’s disregard for most of the Universal catalog, which it acquired in 1962. To
be sure, the film was a mild amusement in its day and seems no more profound today; the sentimental final shot of Bing and
Baby Sandy will make you coo or wince. But it entertains throughout. Butler, who did not consider himself a thinker, knew
how to avoid longueurs. The picture also represents a change in Bing’s screen character, a transition that points ahead to
the deadpan comedy he perfected in the
Road
pictures and the maturity that defined his 1940s persona. Photographed by George Robinson (a Universal veteran better known
for his work on horror films),
East Side of Heaven
looks and feels like an early-forties film, with grayer shades and a relaxed tempo, not to mention Bing’s shorter and wavier
toupee.
One reason Crosby accepted billing above the title was the prominence of Joan Blondell; he allowed the same exception for
Sing You Sinners
because of Fred MacMurray’s stature. Blondell was the first
major Hollywood actress to play opposite Bing since Miriam Hopkins in 1934. Some of his leading ladies became stars after
working with him (Carole Lombard, Joan Bennett, Ida Lupino, Frances Farmer), but the only Crosby cast members during the past
five years with box-office clout were MacMurray and W. C. Fields. Joan Blondell had spent her entire childhood in vaudeville
and emerged in the 1930s as one of the most popular and reliable performers on the Warners lot. She was equally at home in
gangster pictures (usually opposite James Cagney or Warren William) and musicals (usually opposite her husband, Dick Powell).
Now, however, she was freelancing.
East Side of Heaven
was an important role for her, secured by Bing, who had enjoyed working with Joan a year earlier on the
Lux Radio Theater.
The movie opens with a private joke. Jimmy Monaco, who wrote the score with Johnny Burke, had gotten married in November and
recently returned from his honeymoon. In the first scene Bing is at work at the Postal Union, singing greetings on the phone.
One message — to Alice from Kitty — probably refers to Dixie’s friends, but there is no doubt about the next one: to Mr. and
Mrs. James Monaco, whom we see in the midst of a violent quarrel, until she slams the phone down. After work Bing walks into
a hotel lobby and casually exchanges greetings (he poses à la Hermes and twirls his invisible mustache) with Matty Malneck,
who is leading a band no one else pays any attention to.
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Bing had gone to hear Malneck in a Los Angeles club and impulsively offered his band a part in the picture; as there was
no nightclub sequence, Butler planted it in the crowded lobby. Bing then strolls to the receptionist, Blondell, and attempts
to pick her up, but it’s a game. They are, in fact, engaged; their marriage has been postponed, as so often occurs in Depression
movies. Unlike in
Sing You Sinners,
she is the one who wants to delay until he gets a decent job. Their interplay throughout the film is appealing and funny.
The Production Code is tweaked in the next scene, in which we see Bing and his roommate, Mischa Auer, asleep in a double bed
(one of the few scenes in which Bing does not wear a hat); under the Code, married couples were required to sleep in single
beds, but single men could cozy up under the same sheets. Asked by Bing to be his best man, Auer responds: “If the best man
is the best man, why does the bride marry the groom?” The censors were more concerned about the villain of the piece, a radio
gossip named Claudius De Wolfe,
played to unctuous perfection by Jerome Cowan. Butler based the character on real-life society wag Lucius Beebe, known for
his tag line “Are you happy, honey?” Seeing the phrase in the script, Breen wrote Universal, “There must be of course no ‘pansy’
suggestion about the line, ‘Are you happy, honey?’”
The convoluted plot involves an imperious old millionaire who is trying to take his infant grandson from the wife of his alcoholic
son. Meanwhile, Bing takes a job as a singing driver for the Sunbeam Taxi Company, auditioning for the job with the peppiest
song in the underrated Monaco-Burke score, “Sing a Song of Sunbeams.” “The cruising troubadour,” as he is known, offers a
free ride and song to customers to build up business. The Crosby hero has come a long way in one year from the hard-work-is-for-saps
credo of
Sing You Sinners,
but he continues to exemplify the idea of the common-man singer.
The mother leaves the baby in his cab, allowing Bing a kind of “spring practice” to be the perfect dad. His apprenticeship
is accompanied by two fine ballads, “That Sly Old Gentleman (from Featherbed Lane),” which he delivers so convincingly that
Blondell, listening in the hall, thinks he’s got an older babe in there, and the title number, a lullaby composed with Bing-friendly
low-note swoops (bars five to seven and twenty-one to twenty-three). Thanks to Bing and pals, the millionaire is reunited
with his family. The malevolent Claudius DeWolfe, whose show the millionaire sponsored, is fired, giving Bing his program.
And that’s how crooners are born.
“In New York they’re on their knees begging for business,”
Variety
lamented, blaming the dearth of moviegoers on the World’s Fair, a disabling heat wave, and sporting events.
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Under the circumstances,
East Side of Heaven
would be lucky to take in $55,000 at Radio City, the paper warned. Yet a week later the tide came in and Bing’s picture emerged
as a sizable hit in the most fabled of movie seasons, 1939. Reviews helped. The New York
Daily News
gushed, “Bing Crosby’s pictures are getting better and better.
East Side of Heaven
is the most delightfully amusing film he’s ever done.”
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Variety
called it a “grand package of entertainment,” singling out its smart pace (“hitting a nice tempo at the start and rolling
merrily to the finish”), and noted how unusual it was for a star to “toss his own coin into productions to get a shot at a
cut of the profits.”
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Baby Sandy was declared by New York’s
Herald Tribune
“our favorite actor of the month.”
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