Bing Crosby (96 page)

His first major hit of the New Year, recorded the previous December, four years after he turned it down as too high-class,
was Victor Herbert’s “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life.” It was a fitting beginning to the year of
The Star Maker,
a year largely consecrated to a revival of old styles of show business Bing had so decisively helped bury. Beyond movie and
vaudeville songs, he recorded a few good standards; a couple of terrible songs, as favors; six remakes of youthful Crosby
classics (plus two from the Whiteman period); and brief returns to Hawaii and the West. The patriotic songs added a new flavor
to the mix. In all those sessions, he added only one number to the catalog of enduring pop standards, “What’s New?”

Yet 1939 was a good year for new songs. Among those Bing did
not
record that might have suited him to a T were “Day In — Day Out,” “All the Things You Are,” “I Thought About You,” “I Get
Along Without You Very Well,” “Some Other Spring,” “If I Didn’t Care,” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” “South of the Border,”
and “Over the Rainbow.” Instead, he enriched Decca’s coffers with the likes of “Little Sir Echo” (an adaptation of the Boy
Scouts’ anthem), “Whistling in the Wildwood,” and the inscrutably maudlin “Poor Old Rover,” which one would like to think
was intended as a jape — after all, it was cowritten by Del Porter, an architect of Spike Jones’s City Slickers, and recorded
with Spike himself on drums.
¹⁴
Audible evidence fails to support that hope.

Beyond the dubious material was the issue of John Trotter’s one-an-a-two-an-a arrangements and a clique of soloists who, outside
the
Hollywood studio system, would have made no bandleader’s A-list. Compared with Bob Crosby’s band, for example, which enjoyed
an outstanding year with its new trumpet star, Billy Butterfield, and clarinetist Irving Fazola, Trotter’s regulars (trumpeter
Andy Secrest, saxophonist Jack Mayhew) were also-rans, and while they served his arrangements proficiently, the question remains:
in an era of phenomenal musicianship, why was its most prized vocalist (voted, in January 1939, number one crooner of the
United States by song promoters and, more democratically, best male singer by the readers of
Down Beat)
so rarely challenged by his peers?

“What’s New?,” one of Bing’s two mightiest hits that year, resulted from a distant collusion with his baby brother’s band.
While experimenting with a cycle of chord changes, Bob Haggart devised a melody and arranged it as a concerto for Billy Butterfield,
whom he and Bob Crosby discovered playing in a Kentucky band shell. The record, “I’m Free,” made Butterfield a jazz star and
convinced many that, with a lyric, the song could be a smash. Johnny Mercer, who wrote the band’s greatest success of the
year, “Day In — Day Out,” tried his hand and, for once, was stumped. “He worked on it for two months,” Haggart remembered,
“but he said, ‘I keep coming up with the same thing — I’m free, free as the birds in the trees, da da da da.’ And so he just
never did it, and then along comes Johnny Burke, who changed the whole idea.”
¹⁵

Burke liked the tune and, as Haggart later learned, had a conversation at the time with Larry Crosby. Larry told him, “You
know, I love your lyrics, but they’re all very poetic. Couldn’t you write something more conversational?” “Like what?” he
asked. Larry said, “Like ‘what’s new?’ ‘how’s things?’ something like that, one-on-one.”
¹⁶
Haggart, who never met Burke, did not know he had written a lyric until he heard Bing’s record, arranged for Trotter by the
gifted bandleader Claude Thornhill. As Bing’s record took off, other bandleaders (Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Hal Kemp)
adapted the song as a feature for their vocalists, and it endured as a standard, cropping up decade after decade in versions
by Louis Armstrong, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, Linda Ronstadt, and many others. Bing’s performance is piquant in its conversational
tact: the coolly interrogative “what’s new?” belying the difficulty of a phrase that changes key after the first bar, from
C to A flat; the atypical dropped-g on
treatin’;
clipped consonants
on
bit
and
admit;
all contrasted with polished mordents and mellifluous high notes.

“What’s New?” typified the evolution in Bing’s style from, as critic John McDonough wrote, the “husky baritone of the 1931
Brunswicks to the mellow pipe organ”
¹⁷
of the 1940s — an organ so seemingly unaffected that, to paraphrase Huey Long, it made every man a crooner, at least in his
own mind. Even
Time,
in its give-and-take manner, was touched: “Once more Crooner Crosby illuminates a dull song by singing it as though it were
the best song he had ever heard.”
¹⁸

But consider the other five sides recorded at that June 30 session. Bing did himself and Harry Barris no service by recording
his former partner’s laborious “Neighbors in the Sky,” which Kapp buried on the B-side of a middling duet with Connie Boswell,
“Start the Day Right.” (A few months before, Bing had done Barris the real kindness of reprising three of his great songs
from the Cocoanut Grove.) He was similarly at a loss trying to mine something from Walter Donaldson’s “Cynthia,” recorded
at the behest of his song publisher friend Rocco Vocco. Donaldson had ruled the roost in the 1920s, turning out dozens of
enduring hits, but by the mid-1930s his style was outmoded, and despite Hollywood assignments, he wrote only a few important
songs, notably “Did I Remember?” With its wordy imagery and disharmonious repetition of the name Cynthia, his new opus had
no chance. Bing’s forgotten record is not without appeal, despite an error (he turns a verb into a gerund), but Kapp buried
it until 1940, when Bing scored Donaldson’s last two hits, written with Johnny Mercer, who joined Bing for buoyant duets on
“Mister Meadowlark” and “On Behalf of the Visiting Firemen.”

The rest of the session was devoted to Gus Edwards — two admirable collaborations with the Music Maids. The first is a medley
set up by the Maids (“School Days”) followed by savory Crosby snippets of “Sunbonnet Sue,” “Jimmy Valentine,” and the nimble
“If I Was a Millionaire.” The last two are so pleasing, he might easily have made entire records of them. In the case of “Jimmy
Valentine,” that may have been the initial intention, as a fluff take, from the movie prerecordings, survives with an ominous
spoken introduction in the manner of “Skeleton in the Closet.” Just as Bing was finishing the first chorus, he slipped up
and, without breaking stride, sang it into oblivion:

Look out! Look out!

For when you see his lantern shine

That’s the time to jump right up and shout

uh, Help!, Oh Jesus Christ, I blew the time

And I’m a dirty son of a bitch

When Jimmy Valentine…

Edwards had learned his trade in the early years of Tin Pan Alley vaudeville, when topicality meant everything. The year he
wrote “Jimmy Valentine,” O. Henry’s good-hearted burglar had been revived as the hero of a popular play. In 1905 Edwards wrote
“In My Merry Oldsmobile,” in recognition of the two automobiles that traversed half the country, from Detroit to Portland,
in forty-four days. Composing the first hit tune to glorify the horseless carriage did not get Gus the free Olds he tried
to pry out of the company, but it made him enough money to buy several. In later years, though, radio stations refused to
play the song because it was considered akin to an advertisement. The embargo hurt sales of Bing’s superb version with the
general public (the BBC banned it outright), but Decca scored all the same when Oldsmobile bought 100,000 discs as part of
a pact with Paramount to cross-promote its 1940 model and
The Star Maker.

Bing’s recorded treatment is far superior to that in the movie. Trotter’s brisk arrangement starts as a waltz, permitting
one chorus each for Bing and the orchestra; then it switches to four-four for the Music Maids, followed by Bing, who enters
swinging. Accompanied by the rhythm section and the Maids, he peaks with a suavely injected “automo-bub-bub-bubbel-in’,” before
finishing with a Barris-style
shhh!
Four choruses in less than two and a half minutes: imagine if Trotter had opened it up with soloists and given Bing another
chorus. Bix Beiderbecke rescued a tedious version of the song back in 1927, but for sheer élan, his chorus had nothing on
Bing’s.

The movie songs produced other gems, often alchemized from chancy material. Three days after wrapping
East Side of Heaven,
he insightfully interpreted the songs for Decca. In the title number, his pearly vowels and nuances — he makes the word
same
(“it’s the same old Manhattan”) a worldly sigh of routine — make more of the song than it’s worth. (The first orchestral
interjection will be recognized by many as the four-note riff from
The Twilight Zone.)
Burke took the
idea for “Hang Your Heart on a Hickory Limb” from a maxim his wife often repeated, and inserted a Jesuitical piece of advice
he figured Crosby would appreciate: “For every bit of pleasure there’ll be pain / If you feel that’s no bargain, then abstain.”
Bing capers through the verse and into the chorus, employing his old technique of squeezing in extra syllables toward the
end, leading Crosby expert and singer Arne Fogel to comment, “Only Bing can be so funky, swingy, and funny at the same time.”
¹⁹
Jimmy Monaco used an unusual fortyeight-bar
aba
format for “Sing a Song of Sunbeams,” a song that ushered in a spate of Crosbyan odes to sanguinity, most famously the 1944
“Swinging on a Star.”

Burke once explained his method for writing Bing’s lyrics, and it was no different than Carroll Carroll’s for writing radio
scripts. “The most successful device,” he said, “was to listen to Bing’s conversation and either take my phrases directly
from him or pattern some after his way of putting phrases together.”
²⁰
An evident example among the four songs he and Monaco wrote for
The Star Maker
is “Go Fly a Kite” (he rhymes
wind
and
chagrined),
which in Trotter’s staid arrangement makes for a less than impassioned record — until Bing’s Armstrongian closing chorus.
The flat sentimentality of “A Man and His Dream” and “Still the Bluebird Sings” are partly redeemed by “An Apple for the Teacher”
— in the picture a Linda Ware nonentity, but on record a jaunty duet for Bing and Connie Boswell, whose pouty on-the-beat
southern inflections show precisely why the youthful Ella Fitzgerald (whom Bing later named as the best singer alive) adored
her. Propelled by Perry Botkin’s guitar, it preceded “What’s New?” as a top seller.

Jack Kapp’s instincts aside, Bing’s new style lent itself to old songs, an ironic circumstance for the man who not too long
before embodied Jazz Age modernity. Bing plainly delighted in the simple diatonic melodies of the bygone era, and the songs
brought out his most ingenuous charm. Frank Sinatra debuted on records in 1939, with Harry James’s band, though it was little
noted at the time. Yet four years later, to exploit his momentous triumph as a single, one of those selections with James,
“All or Nothing at All,” was re-released and rocketed up the charts to become his first million-seller. In retrospect, the
irony was unmistakable: at the moment Sinatra had extended the
interpretation of lyrics — patented by Bing on records like “What’s New?” — into a darker and more personal realm, Bing had
reserved much of his most poignant work for the easier mercies of nostalgia.

Despite the rearguard repertory, Bing did not succumb to musical apathy. He continued to find ways to enliven the old with
nuance and power. “If I Had My Way” is exemplary, a Crosby waltz in which phrases resonate like gongs, thanks to perfect parallel
mordents, over a slow but pulsing tempo; the voice is lovely, the high notes exquisite, and the emotions deeply persuasive
and of a sort no one else could have mustered. The romantic vulnerability of a Sinatra is unsuited to these elemental melodies.
They demand a bounteous voice and temperament to avoid bathos while cutting through the cobwebs. Despite its egregiously antiquated
minstrel lyric, Bing’s “The Missouri Waltz” is a neglected gem. It suggests that the king of technology and prince of jazz
was also the last nineteenth-century man, an artist genuinely besotted by the past — that is, genuinely capable of extracting
nuggets of beauty and sentiment where his contemporaries found only corn.

On a few sessions Bing’s accompaniment combined John Scott Trotter’s Frying Pan Five (a name that promised more steam than
it delivered) and the Foursome, a vocal choir that doubled on a variety of instruments. Bing had casually met two of the singers,
Ray Johnson and Del Porter, in Spokane, when he was a Musicalader and they were appearing with a band at the Davenport Hotel.
They later teamed with two other singers, worked for Mack Sennett, and scored on Broadway in
Girl Crazy.
A few Hollywood films followed, but they were about to head East again when Bing invited them to appear on
KMH;
soon they became regulars on Bob Burns’s summer replacement show. What Bing and Trotter liked about the Foursome, beyond
their efficient harmonies, was their unison playing of the ocarina, a potato-shaped wind instrument with ten holes that produces
pure tones (no partials or overtones). The combination of ocarinas and Del Porter’s clarinet provided a catchy freshness to
oldies (“Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider” and “Down by the Old Mill Stream”) and western songs (“When the Bloom Is on the Sage”
and the bestselling “Alla en el Rancho Grande,” Bing’s first time singing in flawless Spanish). The sound inspired Burke and
Monaco to write a song about the ocarina for
Road to Singapore.

* * *

Bing recorded every week in March, early April, and — after completing
The Star Maker
— every week in June. His radio show continued to wax in popularity with the usual guests, including Frances Langford, William
Frawley, Bert Lahr, Joan Bennett, Matty Malneck, Pat O’Brien, Leo McCarey, Florence George (Everett’s new wife), Freddie Bartholomew,
Rudolph Ganz, Jackie Cooper, John Wayne, Gladys Swarthout, Walter Damrosch, Basil Rathbone, Walter Huston, Lucille Ball, and
so forth. Bing filled his downtime with sporting events. He played tennis at the Palm Springs Racquet Club (along with Errol
Flynn, Frank Morgan, and other film stars); participated in the broadcast of a two-minute Joe Louis fight; and traveled to
Boston to watch Ligaroti come in next to last at Suffolk Downs, ending a meteoric career. Bing had bad luck of a different
kind when his horse Midge raced at Hollywood Park and he sent a friend to bet a large sum on the nose; Midge won, but the
friend did not get to the track on time. Bing found a few days to join Dixie in Palm Springs, where they threw a party at
Cafe La Maze for the Eddie Lowes, the Dave Butlers, and the Herb Polesies. Then it was back to
The Star Maker
and Jack Kapp.