"Not many people know that longtime chairman of the board of Paramount Pictures, Adolph Zukor, and I were very close friends. I'm not sure that even Zukor knew it. But Gracie and I did make about a dozen pictures for him. And I would often go into his office and play gin rummy with him. We were playing one time, and he knocked and said, "I'm going down with ten." But he had eleven - he had a seven and a four. I said, "Before we throw the cards in, Mr. Zukor, you know Gracie and I are now doing this picture with Bing Crosby, and in it Crosby sings five songs. How about letting me sing one of those songs? " He looked right at me at said, "George, Bing Crosby, one of our major stars, is going to sing all five songs." So I looked back at him and said, "Mr. Zukor, you got eleven." He said, "George, you and Gracie have been with us now for six years. Do you like working for Paramount?"
"I love it."
"Do you like living out here?"
"I love it."
"You wouldn't want to move back east?"
"No, sir."
Then he said, "How much is seven and four?"
I said, "Ten."
Bing Crosby sang the five songs, Gracie and I never moved back east, and I never won a game of gin rummy from Mr. Zukor.
Lombard, who had regretted turning down the co-starring role in the Crosby hit film The Big Broadcast (1932), leapt at the chance to work with him when Miriam Hopkins rejected the female lead in We're Not Dressing. The film shot for three weeks on Catalina Island, off the California coast. The feisty actress and Crosby got along very well, according to Gary Giddins' biography Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, The Early Years 1903-1940. Crosby was amused by Lombard's antics, including her penchant for practical jokes and coarse language; Giddins writes, "Bing enjoyed her dedicated swearing 'colorful epithets' he described as 'good, clean, and lusty. Her swear-words weren't obscene. They were gusty and eloquent. They resounded, they bounced. They had honest zing!'" Her jokes included flashing Crosby between takes and commanding the attention of the cast and crew's hotel guests by loudly asking Bing at breakfast if she left her nightie in his room the night before. Her charm was inexplicable: Crosby wrote, "The fact that she could make us think of her as being a good guy rather than a sexy mamma is one of those unbelievable manifestations impossible to explain. She was the least prudish person I've ever known."
Lombard, who would tragically perish in a plane crash five years later, seemed to hold the key to her joie d'vie: in a 1938 interview, she declared, "I love everything I do. I'm intensely interested in and enthusiastic about everything I do, everything. No matter what it is I'm doing, no matter how trivial, it isn't trivial to me. I give it all I've got, and I love it. I love living, I love life. Eating, sleeping, waking up again, skeet-shooting, sitting around an old barn doing nothing, my work, taking a bath, talking my ears off, the little things, the big things, the simplest things, the most complicated things--I get a kick out of everything I do while I'm doing it."
Producer: Benjamin Glazer
Director: Norman Taurog
Screenplay: Horace Jackson, George Marion, Jr., Francis Martin, Benjamin Glazer (story), J.M. Barrie (play)
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Film Editing: Stuart Heisler
Art Direction: Hans Dreier, Ernst Fegte
Music: Mack Gordon, Harry Revel
Cast: Bing Crosby (Stephen Jones), Carole Lombard (Doris Worthington), George Burns (George), Gracie Allen (Gracie), Ethel Merman (Edith), Leon Errol (Hubert).
BW-77m.
by Eleanor Quin
