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  Ovation for Gary Giddins’s

  BING CROSBY: A POCKETFUL OF DREAMS The Early Years 1903-1940

  Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the Theater Library Association Award

  “Gary Giddins has performed a great service in tracking Crosby’s life and career so scrupulously. He’s not only superb on the music, but he also has lovingly considered the films of the ’30s…. A masterly performance.”

  — Robert Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

  “A literary tour de force that redefines the pejorative genre ‘show-business biography’ and suggests the genre’s potential as serious scholarship and even perhaps as art…. Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams is a compelling narrative of one of our most important and underrated historical figures, and it’s a durable companion. You have to read the book to get to know him; maybe reread it. It’s that good.”

  — Bruce McCabe, Boston Globe

  “An ambitious, literate, and eminently readable biography of the famed crooner…. Giddins’s account is big, but lean; there’s no padding, but instead a wealth of observation not only on Crosby’s early career but also on its social and historical context. A pleasure for fans, this is likely to become both the standard biography of the singer and a model for other show business lives.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams demonstrates the advantages of good history over jaded generational memory…. In Bing Crosby, Giddins sees the story of a monumental cultural force, and the author has given his subject duly epic treatment.”

  —David Hajdu, Village Voice

  “A terrific biography…. Giddins takes a fresh and compelling look at the forgotten first half of Crosby’s long career, turning the clock back to the Roaring Twenties to show how Crosby started out as a hard-drinking, hard-swinging jazzman whose nonchalant way with a song was universally regarded, even in Harlem, as the height of hipness.”

  — Terry Teachout, Time

  “Giddins is a dangerous critic; his writing is so evocative he can make you think yourself intimate with music you’ve never even heard. He believes. By the end of Part One, the reader does, too.”

  — John Anderson, Newsday

  “Giddins has done his work diligently, cutting through the encrustation of myth and press agentry surrounding Bing Crosby in — and since — his lifetime, bringing welcome clarity to his rise as a singer, radio personality, and movie actor and mapping his personal life with admirable objectivity.”

  — Richard M. Sudhalter, Los Angeles Times

  “The author’s boundless but utterly clear-eyed enthusiasm for his subject is contagious.”

  — Joanne Kaufman, People

  “While Giddins covers Crosby’s personal life in detail, including his early alcoholism and marriage to actress Dixie Lee, the heart and soul of the book is the author’s infectious love of Bing Crosby’s performances. It’s catching.”

  — Tom Beer, Biography Magazine

  “Giddins offers ripe social insights and Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams soars when it shows what the singer meant to America, not just to American music.”

  — John Freeman, Denver Post

  “Hits all the notes, meticulously…. One of the best aspects of Giddins’s approach is his ability to place Crosby in terms of his time, both historically and musically. The book is an education in terms of popular music…. The definitive biography for the ages.”

  — Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

  “Giddins’s fascination with the environment from which artists emerge enhances all his writings…. He covers Bing’s fabulous ascendancy to stardom from 1927 to 1935 brilliantly — band singing, stage shows, radio broadcasts, filmmaking, golfing, and wild parties across the land.”

  — Philip Elwood, San Francisco Chronicle

  “No singer should be without this book. It’s the story, among other things, of the man who invented American pop singing.”

  — Tony Gieske, Hollywood Reporter

  “As Gary Giddins makes plain in his perceptive and exhaustively researched biography, Crosby was the right man at the right place at the right time…. Giddins has a keen understanding of who Bing Crosby was, how he got that way, and why he was so widely, gratefully loved. I await his second volume with eager expectation.”

  — Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

  Books by Gary Giddins

  Riding on a Blue Note (1981)

  Rhythm-a-ning(1985)

  Celebrating Bird (1987)

  Satchmo(1988)

  Faces in the Crowd (1992)

  Visions of Jazz (1998)

  Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams —

  The Early Years, 1903-1940 (2001)

  copyright

  Copyright © 2001 by Gary Giddins

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, January 2001

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: November 2009

  Permissions acknowledgments appear on page 694.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-09156-5

  for Lea and Deborah

  and Alice, Helen, and Norman

  and Rosemary Clooney

  It is a pleasure to think about Bing Crosby.

  —Gilbert Seldes, The Public Arts

  To be interesting, a man must be complex and elusive. And I rather fancy it must be a great advantage for him to be born outside his proper time and place.

  —Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Circle

  The bearers of the myth of every decade seem to carry in their hands the ax and the spade to execute and inter the myth of the previous one.

  —Murray Kempton/Part of Our Time

  Whatever might have been bad in the first part of his life, was surely condemned and reformed by his better judgement.

  —Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets

  Let us consider the case of a bodily voice.

  —Saint Augustine, Confessions

  Contents

  Ovation for Gary Giddins’s

  Books by Gary Giddins

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Part One: BINGO FROM BINGVILLE

  1: The Harrigans

  2: The Crosbys

  3: Tacoma

  4: Spokane

  5: Gonzaga

  6: Mr. Interlocutor

  7: Musicaladers

  8: Vaudeville

  9: Whiteman

  10: Rhythm Boys

  11: Of Cabbages and Kings

  12: Dixie

  13: Prosperity Is Just Around the Crooner

  Part Two: EVERYBODY’S BING

  14: Big Broadcast

  15: The Crosby Clause

  16: Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

  17: Under Western Skies

  18: More Than a Crooner

  19: Decca

  20: Kraft Music Hall

  21: Public Relations

  22: Homecoming

  23: A Pocketful of Dreams

  24: Captain Courageous

  25: What’s New

  26: Easy Riders

  Discography

  Filmography

  Notes and Sources

  Interviews and Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  There was a time, not so long ago, when it was truthfully said that no hour
of the day or night, year after year, passed without the voice of Bing Crosby being heard somewhere on this earth.

  —Gilbert Seldes, The Public Arts(1956) 1

  His last words were characteristic. Walking off the eighteenth green of the La Moraleja Golf Club, in a suburb of Madrid, Bing Crosby said, “That was a great game of golf, fellas,” and then took a few steps and was gone. 2 The three Spanish champions who made up the foursome had ribbed the old crooner about his ratty red sweater and white hat, but Bing and Manuel Pinero won by a single stroke and collected ten dollars. Bing had been in a good mood all afternoon, singing and laughing during the four-and-a-half-hour match, shooting a respectable 85, a lot better than his 92 the day before. He was scheduled to hunt partridge in the countryside the next day; then, on Sunday, fly west to the island resort of Palma de Majorca for more golf before starting home to San Francisco.

  But after what was to be his last game, shortly after 6:00 P.M. on October 14, 1977, about twenty yards from the clubhouse, Crosby silently crumpled. The others thought he had slipped. When they realized he had suffered a massive heart attack, they frantically administered oxygen and cardiac tonic injections. An hour later, at Madrid’s Hospital de la Cruz Roja, Bing Crosby was pronounced dead on arrival — “cardiac insufficiency due to coronariopathies and valvular sclerosis.” 3

  His death was front-page news everywhere. In the United States and Great Britain, his passing was treated as comparable to that of Churchill and de Gaulle. Newspapers then were edited and written by the generation of men and women who came of age during World War II. They remembered Crosby as a shining light during those years, not merely because Der Bingle had made the largest number of V-Discs and army broadcasts, toured in England and France in 1944, and raised $14.5 million in war bonds (a Yank magazine poll declared him the individual who had done the most for GI morale) but because perhaps more than anyone else he had come to define — at a time when national identity was important — what it meant to be American.

  Yet to the swarming generation born after the war, all the reverence was a mystery. He was known to them as a faded and not especially compelling celebrity, a square old man who made orange-juice commercials and appeared with his much younger family on Christmas telecasts that the baby boomers never watched. He had long since disappeared from movies and the hit parade. If children of the sixties knew his work at all, it was from his perennial hit record of “White Christmas,” TV reruns of his Road pictures with Bob Hope, and his duet with David Bowie on “Little Drummer Boy.” They would have been amazed to learn how advanced, savvy, and forceful a musician he had been in his prime.

  That was the cost of having played Everyman too long and too well. Harry Lillis Crosby was the most influential and successful popular performer in the first half of the twentieth century. His was the voice of the nation, the cannily informal personification of hometown decency — friendly, unassuming, melodious, irrefutably American. In his looser and wilder years, when the magnitude of his stardom was without precedent or equal, he had been reckoned the epitome of cool. But universal acceptance demanded of him a willful blandness that obscured the full weight of his achievement. Of the few musicians who had synthesized modernism in popular music and jazz, Crosby received the least serious attention from biographers and critics after 1950. What Edmund Wilson wrote of Charles Dickens’s standing in the 1930s describes Bing Crosby’s at the time of his death: he had become so much a “familiar joke, a favorite dish, a Christmas ritual” that pundits no longer saw “in him the great artist and social critic that he was.” 4

  But more than familiarity laid waste to Crosby’s reputation. Popular culture plays by the numbers, and Bing’s numbers — and the aesthetic they represented — were shaded by those of rock. His art was now as remote from demotic tastes as classical music or jazz. Four of the last century’s most treasured singers died in quick succession in the late summer and fall of 1977: Elvis Presley on August 16, Ethel Waters on September 1, Maria Callas on September 16, and Bing Crosby on October 14. All were American-born and all were celebrated beyond the idioms with which they are primarily associated. Of them, Bing’s stature seemed especially secure: his obituaries triggered so many record sales that MCA (Decca) could not handle the orders and farmed them out to other plants, requiring more than a million discs per day. Yet on the twentieth anniversary of their deaths, only Elvis’s memory was widely acknowledged in mass media. Two years later Newsweek devoted forty-plus pages to “Voices of the Century: America Goes Hollywood,” in which Crosby was not mentioned, except to caption a photograph with Frank Sinatra. 5

  In the decade following his death, Crosby’s personal stature had been tarnished by a one-two punch. 6 First, there was a savage, ineptly researched biography that ignored his art in its haste to show that yet another departed hero had feet of clay. It was soon followed by a resentful memoir by his alcoholic eldest son, Gary Crosby. Under the law, the dead cannot be libeled, and those books, published in the early 1980s, generated an irresponsible piling-on. Unfounded rumors were passed off as fact. 7 The fading portrait of the imperturbable crooner, the soul of affection, the totem of cool, was replaced by the crude rendering of a pinchfaced, right-wing, child-beating philanderer.

  His contemporaries had a more accurate sense of him. Crosby was a phenomenon in the cultural life of the United States long before the war. He had helped lift morale while elucidating the American temperament during the Great Depression, the worst years of privation in the nation’s history. Combining musical cultures as no one had ever done (he sang in every idiom short of grand opera), he made the country a more neighborly and unified place. After the war Crosby became an even bigger star, selling more movie tickets and records than ever, serving as a steady barometer of the postwar mood, a bulwark against the reign of paranoia, an outrider of the affluence that followed. Without any dramatic outward change, he had somehow been the right man for successive crises, assertive and optimistic through Prohibition, the Depression, and hot and cold wars. He had the chameleon’s ability to reflect his surroundings and the artist’s discernment to illuminate them. If Churchill, in his Savile Row pinstripes with his cigars and learned oratory, incarnated the British lion, Bing, in his peculiar motley (shirttails, beat-up hats, torn sweaters, mismatched socks) with his pipe and preternatural calm, embodied the best in American individualism. In 1943 H. Allen Smith observed, “He has been the antithesis of all that the Sunday schools and the Boy Scouts and the ‘Y’ secretaries taught — and look at him!” 8

  Of the handful of artists who remade American music in the 1920s, Crosby may be said to have had the broadest immediate impact, if only because he reached the largest number of people. He played a decisive role in transforming popular song from a maudlin farrago steeped in minstrelsy and vaudeville into a swinging, racially nuanced, and internationally accepted phenomenon that in one form or another dominated the age. He was by no means alone, yet he attained a matchless orbit of popularity. Most histories of the Depression and the New Deal never mention Crosby, as if the rantings of Huey Long or Father Coughlin exercised greater impact on the public temper than “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” “The Last Round-Up,” or “The One Rose.” Yet as many as 50 million people tuned in every Thursday evening to hear Bing’s Kraft Music Hall (1935-46). Consider that the hottest TV series of 2000, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, peaked with 36 million viewers. 9

  Popular art listens, absorbs, reflects, harangues, and can, in troubled times, console. Crosby’s records were as reassuring as President Roosevelt’s “fireside chats.” In a national poll conducted in the late 1940s, Crosby was voted the most admired man alive, ahead of Jackie Robinson, Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, Harry Truman, Bob Hope, and the Pope. 10 Bing was less impressed with himself. He remarked in 1960, “As far as I am concerned, with the exception of a phonograph record or two, I don’t think I have done anything that’s really outstanding or great or marvelous or anything that deserves any superlatives.’ 11
Emerson wrote, “Every hero becomes a bore at last.” 12 Even to himself.

  Except for a confederation of minstrel troupes and chains of vaudeville theaters, the entertainment industry barely existed when Harry Lillis Crosby was born in 1903 to a lower-middle-class Anglo-Irish-American Catholic family. The wax-recorded disc was three years old, and the first nickelodeon was two years down the road. The first regularly scheduled radio broadcasts didn’t begin until 1920. Over the next half century, the United States forged the first empire dependent not on strategic colonies but rather on the irresistible sway of its popular arts. Crosby’s prestige was crucial in shaping that empire, in spreading a New World style and image. Not the least of his achievements was his role in ensuring the prosperity — in some instances, the very survival — of several major entertainment corporations, including CBS, NBC, ABC, Decca Records, Paramount Pictures, and Ampex tape.

  Crosby was the first white vocalist to appreciate and assimilate the genius of Louis Armstrong: his rhythm, his emotion, his comedy, and his spontaneity. Louis and Bing recorded their first important vocals, respectively, in 1926 (“Heebie Jeebies”) and 1927 (“Muddy Water”) and were the only singers of that era still thriving at the times of their deaths, in the 1970s. When Crosby came of age, most successful male singers were effeminate tenors and recording artists were encouraged to be bland, the better to sell sheet music. The term pop singer didn’t exist; it was coined in large measure to describe a breed he invented. Bing perfected the use of the microphone, which transfigured concerts, records, radio, movies — even the nature of social intercourse. As vocal styles became more intimate and talking pictures replaced pantomime, private discourse itself grew more casual and provocative. Bing was the first to render the lyrics of a modern ballad with purpose, the first to suggest an erotic undercurrent.