Bing Crosby Page 11

  Watching Sinbad from the sidelines invigorated Bing, and he participated in several theatrical events his sophomore year. At a vaudeville benefit for Gonzaga High School’s sports program, he took two turns, playing a satirical sketch with a friend, billed as Ray and Bing, and singing comical songs, as Harry Crosby. In a review of It Pays to Advertise, a three-act comedy presented by the Varsity Drama Club, Bing was the only cast member singled out by the student reviewer: “Harry Crosby as the genial press agent ‘Ambrose Peale’ kept the audience in a constant uproar.” 36 A production of the Henry Irving vehicle The Bells by the school’s Henry Irving Dramatic Society, merited a preview in the Spokane Daily Chronicle, which published head shots of the three principals, including Bing, bow-tied and grinning.

  Bing displayed few signs of discontent that year, holding his own in class while playing baseball for the varsity and the semipro Ideal Laundry teams. He won a Distinguished citation in English and a Premium (second place) citation in debating. Math and chemistry were problematic, and Father Kennelly made a point of saying that he was worried about Bing’s performance in the latter. Bing told him with breezy candor, “Well, Father, there’s no use both of us worrying about it.” Kennelly may have been too thunderstruck to launch his key ring, but he was a lot angrier when he heard noises one night in front of the Administration Building and marched over for a look. He found Bing supervising a pulley system as his confederates inside attempted to lower to the ground, piece by piece, a set of school drums. Bing, who needed them for a last-minute gig, had previously succeeded in borrowing the drums on several occasions. Getting caught convinced him to save up for a set of his own.

  Among his summer jobs was a brief stint at Harry’s company, the former Inland Brewery, where he whiled away the time discussing the frustrations of making near beer (they brewed the real article, then “pasteurized it until it was the sissified prohibition stuff”) with an old German braumeister. His job was to roll and upend barrels of cucumbers into the briny vats for pickling, and he hated it. He quit after two weeks and never developed a liking for pickles. He did develop an appetite for true beer, not without inadvertent encouragement from his father, who now and then asked him to “rush the can.” Local speakeasies sold beer in large tin cans with tops and handles, and Harry would give Bing a quarter to fetch one. When Bing siphoned off some of it himself, he would tell Harry that a bunch of kids had chased him and it spilled. That was known as “dropping the can.” One speakeasy Bing knew pretty well was operated by a former fight promoter and con man turned bootlegger. His name was Charles Dale, and he kept the back room of his popular establishment stocked with liquor brought back in suitcases from periodic trips to Butte. Music by bands a lot better than the Dizzy Seven helped Dale lure customers.

  Yet notwithstanding an occasional snifter or tin can, Bing hewed to the straight and narrow. Returning for his third year, he enrolled in the School of Law, taking advantage of a program that would confer A.B. and LL.B degrees in six years — two in the College of Arts and Sciences, four in law. His schedule was characteristically full. He attended regular courses in the forenoons and returned to campus five nights a week, between seven and nine, for classes in law. During afternoons, he worked in the office of Charles Albert, an attorney for the Great Northern Railway. Albert’s widow, actress Sarah Truax, repeated her husband’s favorite story about his former clerk, a likable boy who disappeared from the office to rehearse or nail down engagements for his band. Colonel Albert finally insisted that the stage-struck fellow give his full time to show business. When he saw him next, Bing was pulling down $3,000 a week.

  Law may have appealed to Bing’s sense of theatricality — it is the one career other than politics that routinely turns out real-life Mr. Interlocutors. In any case, the decision was not made lightly. When Bing registered for law school, he had not been tested as an entertainer or musician outside school productions. Even by high-school standards, the Dizzy Seven was undistinguished. The workload he embraced indicates his determination to make good on his parents’ investment and create his future. Bing buried himself in a curriculum of contracts and quasi-contracts, criminal law, torts, property, logic, procedure (legal bibliography), and debate. Membership in the Debating Society was mandatory for students in the special program, as was attaining thirty credits toward the A.B. He now paid less attention to sports and stagecraft. But working for Colonel Albert brought home the disenchanting truth that lawyering entails more drudgery than drama and was not the instant platform for Ciceronian eloquence suggested by the examples of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Second semester, Bing was back on the boards.

  The Spokane Daily Chronicle for February 8, 1923, reported rehearsals for an upcoming performance of George M. Cohan’s Seven Keys to Baldpate, presented by the Gonzaga Dramatic Club with Mike Pecarovich as the lead. Yet the sole accompanying photo was a head shot of Bing (bow tie, big smile), who played the role of Lou Max, “the crooked mayor s man ‘Friday,’ the humorous feature of the cast.” 37 Bing was described as one of the drama club’s “old-timers.” The priest who directed the play selected his cast from the entire student body, reported the Chronicle, for a version of the play Cohan had specially revised for the East Coast Jesuit school, Fordham. In May the Monogram Club presented a sweater to Father Sharp in recognition of his work in assisting Gonzaga sports. An evening of burlesque and music ensued, during which Bing acted in a three-man comedy sketch and sang in unison with the Gonzaga Harmony Trio.

  Enrolling in his fourth year, he continued to work part-time for Charles Albert in the afternoons and took an additional job as night watchman for the Great Northern Railway, studying in a room in its tower on Havermale Island. An acute if fleeting depression hit the country that year, and inevitably the Crosbys felt the impact. Harry, who had been listed in the company books as secretary, was once again let go and then rehired as shipping clerk at a reduced salary. Inland now offered commercial storage in addition to “22 Varieties.” The economic shortfall derailed the ambitions of Bing’s eldest sister, Catherine, who upon graduating Holy Names Academy told a reporter that she expected to study music in the East. She remained at home. Everett returned from Seattle and worked as a bookkeeper, but soon left to rejoin the bootlegging trade. Larry worked for the Chronicle, as did Ted, who concluded his education with a bang, editing the Gonzaga Bulletin and graduating from the School of Philosophy of Letters.

  Ted never stopped turning out stories, poems, and essays for the college paper. One tale, “Sunny Skies,” tells of an abused wife named Grace Crossland, tormented by a hard-drinking husband and afraid to leave her Westchester mansion. That changes after she visits a dude ranch and meets a cowboy named Hale, who greets people with the phrase “sunny skies.” Hale follows Grace home to New York, dispatches her husband, and returns with her to Rancho Los Pinos. The story is chillingly prophetic: Bing’s wife Dixie suffered a mild form of agoraphobia, rarely leaving their estate, and though Bing was never the brute of Ted’s story, he did drive her away with his drinking early in their marriage. But the truly prescient character is Hale, who emphatically anticipates the public Bing: the cool, capable, optimistic, ail-American go-getter who loves horses, operates ranches, and invariably gets the girl. 38

  Bing enjoyed one final theatrical triumph at Gonzaga, when he reprised his role as Ambrose Peale in It Pays to Advertise, in November. What turned out to be his last appearance in a school production netted him his first genuine newspaper review. After praising the Gonzaga Dramatic Club for focusing on plays that allow women’s roles to be “blue pencilled,” to eliminate feminine impersonation (and prove that a drama club can “get along without a woman”), the Spokane Daily Chronicle’s critic praised Pecarovich and Crosby for carrying off “the play’s hilarious moments” and continued: “Mr. Crosby bursts over with spontaneity in getting his amusing lines across the footlights.” 39

  Neither school, work, nor drama diminished Bing’s appetite for music. He listen
ed to everything and without prejudice. He belonged to a generation so dazzled by the sheer availability of diverse music that it did not, unlike subsequent generations, distinguish between hip and square, swing or Mickey Mouse. The only criteria that mattered were whether a performance was interesting and well executed. The father of one of Bing’s friends was a record distributor, so many of the latest numbers were available to him. Ted’s crystal machine also got a workout. Above all, Bing and his friends spent hours listening to records at Bailey’s music shop. They stayed until they were thrown out, rarely buying anything. The mid-1920s signaled an electrifying moment in American music. Jazz and blues were not yet codified as strictly defined genres; there was, instead, a general sense of jazziness and bluesiness. Musical influences from everywhere were fermenting into a whole new brew, and no one could imagine where it would lead; every month brought new sounds to marvel at. Paul Whiteman introduced a nervy Gershwin tune called “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise.” Some listeners were delighted by its bold use of a seventh chord, but most fans were more taken with the trumpet solo, which interpolated two twelve-bar blues choruses right in the middle. A fellow making records under the name Ukelele Ike sang bawdy songs with jazz pizzazz and backed himself on hot ukelele and kazoo. Jolson, who had recorded novelties, now introduced more substantial melodies like “April Showers” and “Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’ Bye).” Dance bands paved new ground and gave Whiteman a run for his money — Fred Waring with “Sleep” and Isham Jones with “It Had to Be You.”

  Many new songs bore the stamp of the South. A group of Whiteman musicians calling themselves the Virginians scored with “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.” The Peerless Quartet, a perennial on the Crosby gramophone, released “’Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” Arthur Gibbs popularized a new dance with his record of “Charleston.” Not everyone understood the racial collusion taking place in the music world, though many who did were outraged and delivered stringent imprecations. Ladies’ Home Journal located a cause and effect between jazz and rape, and cautioned its readers, “Jazz is the expression of protest against law and order, the bolshevik element of license striving for expression in music.” 40 It wasn’t entirely wrong: jazz was widely associated with people who broke the law by drinking bootleg hooch in speakeasies. Rape was a stretch, but then most of the jeremiads employed the word to hyperbolize the greater threat of women who freely expressed their sexuality. Liquor, Ogden Nash wrote, is quicker, and so a syllogism took root: jazz abets drinking, and drinking abets sex; therefore, jazz abets sex, which practiced under the influence of liquor amounts to rape. That Ladies’ Home Journal failed to hear any musical value in jazz is almost immaterial.

  Greater still than the sexual panic was the racial one. To most young people, the hot new music was simply liberating. Few outside the largest cities comprehended how far it went in transgressing the color line. Bing and his friends, for example, probably had no way of knowing that the three songs mentioned above (“I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” “’Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” “Charleston”), though popularized by white bands, were composed by blacks, two of whom were no more southern than Bing. But Crosby had to realize he was witnessing the vanguard of a music brimming with catchy melodies, exciting rhythms, and weird harmonies, an inclusive multicolored all-American music.

  Inspired by Ukelele Ike (Cliff Edwards), Bing carried his father’s banjo-uke to outings at Liberty Lake. He never became proficient on it, though he got some mileage from Ike’s other instrument, the kazoo. That autumn Bing finally saved up enough to buy a set of drums from a mail-order catalog. The bass drum had a Japanese sunset painted on the skin, which could be illuminated by a bulb inside; a gooseneck cymbal waved from the rim. Those drums were perhaps the most significant purchase Bing would ever make, because news of their arrival circulated as far as North Central High School, where a student piano player named Alton Rinker led a small band that avoided stock arrangements in favor of charts he copied by ear from the latest jazz records. Rinker had a problem. The drummer was no good, and the other boys let him go before he could find a replacement. So when he heard about a law student who lived nearby on East Sharp, with a new set of traps, he figured he’d give him a call.

  7

  MUSICALADERS

  On the one hand my friends and I would be hunting after the empty show of popularity —theatrical ap plause from the audience, verse competitions, contests for crowns of straw, the vanity of the stage, immoderate lusts — and on the other hand we would he trying to get clean of all this filth by carrying food to those people who were called the “elect” and the “holy ones. “

  — Saint Augustine, Confessions (c. 400) 1

  Rinker introduced himself and asked Bing whether he would be interested in trying out with a band at North Central: would he like to bring his drums over to the Rinker home on West Mansfield for their next rehearsal? Bing unhesitatingly said yes. The Dizzy Seven had faded away. Law was losing its attraction, and no one was bidding for his services as a musician. Spokane had plenty of professional drummers playing in dance bands, and Bing was neither good enough nor experienced enough to join the union and compete with them for work. The fact that he, a fourth-year college student, was asked to audition for a bunch of high-school kids did not affront his ego in the slightest. He was game for anything.

  Bing did not know Alton Rinker; and as far as Rinker knew, he did not know Bing. But as soon as he opened the door, Alt remembered him. Alt and his brother Miles, who played alto saxophone in the group, had spent countless summer afternoons at the Mission Park pool. “Every time we went swimming there,” Rinker wrote in an unpublished account of his association with Bing, “I would see a young, blond-headed chubby boy, who was older than I. He could swim like a seal and was a good diver off the board. He was well known at the pool and everyone called him Bing.” 2 Years had passed and Bing looked older, but he still carried himself with that impressive authority. As Alt introduced him to Miles and the Pritchard brothers, Bob and Clare, he was struck by Bing’s composure and sharp sense of humor. After Bing set up the drums and they ran down a few numbers, everyone was happy. “We knew right away that he really had a beat,” Rinker recalled. 3 Bing exclaimed, “Oh boy, this is great!” 4

  What was great was the experience of playing music that had some resemblance to the records everyone was listening to. Bob Pritchard played C-melody saxophone, and his brother, Clarence, had a tenor banjo. None of them, including Rinker, could read music, and the only keys they played in were A flat and E flat, which Alt had taught himself on piano: “I don’t know why, but these were black keys and looked easier than the white keys.” 5 With his acute ear, however, he could adapt arrangements from records and assign appropriate notes to each musician. Among the records they worked on were Paul Whiteman’s “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” “Whispering,” and “I Love You”; Ted Lewis’s “When My Baby Smiles at Me”; the Mound City Blue Blowers’ “San”; the Cotton Pickers’ “Jimtown Blues”; and anything they could find by the incredibly prolific Dixieland outfit the Original Memphis Five and Ukelele Ike. 6 Bing knew the records and had no trouble fitting in. He was so pleased with the group that he stood up from his drum seat and announced he could sing, producing, to prove the point, a tiny blue-spangled megaphone. The boys were impressed. “Now we had a good drummer who could also sing,” Rinker wrote, “and it really turned us all on.” 7

  In fact, Bing wasn’t much of a drummer, and in later years whenever the subject came up, he liked to quote Phil Harris’s observation that he had a roll wide enough to throw a dog through. He knew the rudiments and could keep time, but his skills as a percussionist were just about equal to the musical talents of the other guys — which isn’t saying much. But they had enthusiasm to spare, especially Alt and Bing, who, unlike the others and unbeknownst to each other, were growing increasingly restless at school.

  At first, Alt was concerned about how Bing would feel playing
with high-school students. Rinker had just turned sixteen, and Bing was coming up on twenty-one. But the age thing never came up. Perhaps Bing, who had always been a year younger than his friends, liked being the eldest for a change. He established ground rules with Alton early. “I guess I was a little bossy at rehearsals in the way I told the fellows what to play,” Rinker recalled. “I didn’t talk that way to Bing as he was the drummer and didn’t play notes. But after one rehearsal, Bing came over to me and said, You’d better not talk that way to me or I’ll give you a punch in the nose.’ It shook me up and from then on I was careful of how I talked to him at rehearsals.” 8

  The influence of the Rinkers — first Alt and later his older sister, Mildred — on Bing’s career can scarcely be overstated. His friendship with Alt dominated Bing’s life for nearly seven years, ultimately serving as the catalyst for his departure from Spokane and his decision to pursue a life in show business. The association remained the central experience in Rinker’s professional life, causing him some bitterness when the friendship died and he realized that despite his success as a radio producer and composer, he would be remembered mainly as an appendage to the Crosby story. But in the beginning, Alton and Bing needed each other. Rinker provided the energy and leadership necessary to spur his pal along. Bing offered Rinker companionship and an entrée to his own clique of college boys, filling a need left by the death of Alt’s mother years before and a temporary abandonment by his father. Bing even renamed him, insistently calling him Al, instead of Alt (rhymes with vault). Pretty soon Al’s friends and family followed suit. Though the relationship ended badly, it is impossible to read the unpublished memoir Al wrote shortly before his death without perceiving an unrequited admiration. On the surface, the young men appeared to be two branches off the same tree.