The Groaner

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Out of the Paramount Studio in Hollywood last week came some of the most uninhibited, daffy nonsense to hit the U. S. screen since the heyday of Harold Lloyd. It was Road to Zanzibar, and its principal assets were two recruits from radio who bounced gaily through its inanities like a pair of playful puppies. For one of them, Bob Hope, it was the tenth film in a new and rapidly rising movie career; for the other, Bing Crosby, a dulcet, broken-toned singer who has confounded all the rules of show business for more than ten years, it was his 24th feature-length picture.

During his eight solid years with Paramount, Bing has played every type of character from a river romeo (Mississippi) to a rough sketch of himself (Sing You

Sinners). From the start he has insisted on having important stars around him, while his contemporaries were fighting for single billing. Last year, he teamed with Come dian Bob Hope in Road to Singapore, although Hope's ad-libbing prowess was supposed to be worse than death for any other comedian within range. Bing held his ground, and the result was one of the slap-happiest comedies of the season.

Road to Zanzibar makes no bones about being a continuation of these antics.

This time Crosby and Hope are a footsore carnival combination working their way through Africa. Hope, as Fearless Frazier, a harassed stooge who has to be shot from a cannon or wrestle an octopus, wants to get home to Birch Falls, Iowa. Crosby always interrupts the plan with a new enterprise. Before it is over, they take a safari through the jungle with Dorothy Lamour and Una Merkel, almost get eaten by cannibals.

The comedy hauled out of this unremarkable framework is one part radio, one part vaudeville, one part lunacy. The trail of the safari through the jungle is illustrated with an animated map. The voice of a commentator speaks: "Week after week they plod onward with nothing to guide them but the stars by night and the sun by day. . . . And so our safari is forced to rest--hoping to regain their strength with generous helpings of wart-hog stew." When a group of savages are arguing in their native tongue, very liberal English translations appear at the bottom of the screen. When Crosby tries to argue Hope into wrestling the octopus, he explains : "I'm trying to make you famous--people will write books about you." Cracks Hope: "Well, I know three words that won't be in 'em--'ripe old age.' " Bing-of-all-Trades. Road to Zanzibar is not a 100% movie. That is as it should be, for its star is not a 100% movie star.

He is a law student who turned to singing as a gag, and while making fortunes in cinema, the radio and the phonograph record business, has operated a race track, a horse farm, had an interest in two prize fighters and a girls' baseball team.

Harry Lillis Crosby, "The Groaner" to his friends, is also happily married to a trig, blonde lady who was once an actress.

He lives in a sunny, 14-room house with an adjoining tennis court and swimming pool where he roughhouses in off hours with four shiny, beaming sons. He plays par golf, and possesses an honorary Ph.D.

degree.

Casual, talented and loaded with Irish luck, the Crosby career is also notable for making a bum out of Horatio Alger. For in 37 years, Bing Crosby has shed a confusing new light on the problem of how to be a success. He has never studied music or voice or pounded the pavements looking for work; yet jobs kept turning up--each a little better than the last. He always falls uphill. Year after year he just sings, and people pay fortunes to hear him. Over the radio, Bing's voice is worth $7,500 for one hour's broadcast a week.

On records, it sold 3,500,000 discs this year and earned him $77,000. In the movies, it brings him $175,000 a picture for three pictures a year.

The Beginning. As one of seven children of a Spokane, Wash, accountant, Bing's earliest leanings were towards having fun. Pleasant and easygoing, he liked to swim at Mission Park on hot days or whack around the Downriver golf course with his rusty, secondhand clubs. His vague goal was the law, which he leisurely studied at nearby Gonzaga University.

Now & then he picked up some spending money by rattling the drums and singing in the six-piece high-school band of his friend Al Rinker.

Once on a vacation trip to Los Angeles, Bing and Al ran out of money, had to find jobs or head home. They polished up a couple of tunes, landed a job in a local theatre. Al played the piano and Bing stood by, tapping a cymbal while they harmonized on some speedy ditties like Paddlin' Madeline Home and Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue. It earned them $65 a week apiece, which bought all the fun they wanted. Just when everything was going smoothly, Paul Whiteman heard them, offered them $150 a week to join his show.

That was Bing's start. From then on he violated the strictest tenets of success.

Whiteman let him go because he was lazy, and he immediately landed a better job at Los Angeles' Cocoanut Grove. The Grove fired him for disappearing on long weekends to Palm Springs and Agua Caliente, and Mack Sennett hired him to act in some movie shorts. Prohibition booze gave him laryngitis which muffled his voice to a whisper, and he received a $3,000-a-week radio contract. Eddie Lang, his best friend and accompanist, died, and Bing wound up making pictures for Paramount. He seemed listless, but his income always increased.

Bing's future was summarized by coony Hollywood Producer Sol Wurtzel at the time Bing was singing at the Grove. Wurtzel noticed that Dixie Lee, one of his actresses on the Fox lot, seemed to be spending a lot of time with Bing, so he warned her: "Dixie, you'd better give that fellow up, because if you marry him, you'll have to support him for the rest of your life." She did and she has not.

Success. Ever since his fight with the Grove in 1931, Bing has let other people run his affairs. They are crack Los Angeles Attorney Jack O'Melveny and his two brothers, Everett and Larry. At that time his brother, Everett, and O'Melveny incorporated him into Bing Crosby, Ltd.

to keep his hands off his property. Bing is now the major stockholder in the profitable little Del Mar race track, owns a 100-acre breeding ranch near the track, some 75 horses, and enough ready cash to pay a $377,000 income tax for 1940.

The Life. With affluence and a family, Bing's life has slipped into more conservative channels. Nowadays if he isn't working he likes to get out to the track for the early-morning workouts, squeeze in 18 or 36 holes of golf in the morning, hurry back to the track for the afternoon racing.

Except for an occasional nightclub outing with Dixie, he spends his evenings at home with the family telling the boys bedtime stories in Crosbyesque slang. One night Little Red Riding Hood finally gets "hep" that the wolf isn't grandma; the next night Goldilocks makes a "three-bowl parlay" on the bears' porridge. Every few months he asks over his old musician friends--Manny Klein, Lennie Hayton, Joe Venuti, and whoever happens to be in town--for a jam session in his large rumpus room. Summers he packs the family off to the ranch near Del Mar.

Although Bing's activities are quieter, his manner isn't. Old friends from Spokane still recognize the happy-go-lucky Crosby approach which is transmitted to radio audiences in the jargon which keeps the Kraft Music Hall one of the peppiest shows on the air. There is no room for the usual tense radio nerves around K. M. H.

with The Groaner trucking around the studio stage in an old pair of slacks and the tails of his gaudy shirts hanging out, kidding the men in the control booth or joking with wheel-chaired Connie Boswell.

The show always has an impromptu atmosphere on the air and has a bad habit of running long, as Bing never holds a full rehearsal. If anything goes wrong, Bing's trigger-quick tongue is a certain safeguard. Recently, when Guest Jackie Cooper dropped his drummer's sticks during an act, Bing filled in with: "Hold the phone, there's been a nasty accident." For his solos, Bing has had one or two rehearsals with the band to get the timing, merely pulls out his pipe and tucks his gum against his teeth when the time comes to go on. Jack Kapp, for whom Bing makes Decca records, recalls that The Groaner's singing is so facile he recorded the complicated Ballad for Americans in four hours. The same song took Paul Robeson three weeks.

The Voice. The gloomy souls who prophesied such a shoddy ending to Bing's career overlooked the most important Crosby quality. Like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Bill Tilden, who thrilled the fans of the '203, Bing knows how to please the crowd, all ages, all sexes. Journalist Joseph Chamberlain Furnas (--And Sudden Death) stated the case with scientific coolness when he wrote: "The prevalent feminine verdict is still that [Crosby]is definitely cute, while the masculine part of the audience seems not to mind him at all--which distributes the positive and negative reactions in exactly the right places." That Bing Crosby's voice is America's favorite depends upon the fact that it not only sounds good, but that Crosby sings every song--whether it is Mexicali Rose or Silent Night, Holy Night--as though he felt it was the best song ever written.

And characteristically, the happy-go-lucky Groaner manages to convey the impression that anyone could do the trick.

Says he: "A crooner gets his quota of sentimentality with half his natural voice. That's a great saving. I don't like to work."

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