Bing Crosby Page 12
Al was born on December 20, 1907, the third of four children, on a thousand-acre wheat farm sixty miles from Spokane, across the Idaho state line. His mother, Josephine, was half Cour d’Alene Indian, and since the farm was on the reservation, the land had been deeded to her tax-free. The eldest of Al’s siblings was his sister, Mildred, a skillful bareback rider who rode five miles to school every morning on a buckskin pony with their brother Miles clinging to her waist. In the 1930s she would be celebrated as the “Rockin’ Chair Lady,” for her record of the Hoagy Carmichael song “Rockin’ Chair,” and would become almost as well known for her weight as for her swinging birdlike voice. Yet Mildred was a slip of a girl, barely five feet tall; until she was twenty, she weighed less than a hundred pounds. Like the Crosby place, the Rinker home echoed with music. Their father, Charles, played fiddle and called square dances at the community’s occasional socials. His wife, Josephine, a devout Catholic who had studied music with the nuns at Tekoa, was a pianist who played by ear — classics, opera songs, and ragtime, including a favorite of Al’s she called “Dill Pickles.” During the years when the children were young, she sat down at the piano every evening after supper and taught Mildred to play and sing. Al recalled that Mildred favored songs of longing and exotic places, like “Siren of the Southern Seas,” “Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight,” “Araby.”
When Al was five, Charles hired a tenant to run the farm and moved his family to a house on Spokane’s North Side, where he operated an auto-supply shop. Four years later Josephine succumbed to tuberculosis. The distraught widower with four children (including the baby, Charles Jr.) hired and soon married an abusive housekeeper named Mrs. Pierce. “I think he had lost his mind,” Alwrote. “Compared to her, the wicked stepmother in Grimms’ Fairy Tales was a fairy godmother.” 9 Mildred loathed her, and at seventeen she packed a bag, kissed her brothers and bid them and her father good-bye, and left for Seattle, where she stayed with an aunt while working as a sheet-music demonstrator at Woolworth’s. She quickly married and divorced Ted Bailey, electing to retain his name because she thought it sounded more American than the Swiss-derived Rinker. As Prohibition went into effect, she began to sing in speakeasies in Seattle and Canada, where she met and married Benny Stafford, a bootlegger.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Pierce issued an ultimatum: Mr. Rinker would have to choose either her and her daughter or his own children. “He must have been under a spell,” Al wrote, “because he finally sent us to the Catholic Academy in Tekoa, Washington.” 10 The boys were miserable, but whenever their father brought them home, Mrs. Pierce would force him to send them away again. On one occasion when she beat him with a broom, Al hauled off and punched her in the stomach. After that, she agreed to a compromise: Al and Miles were permitted to enroll as boarders at Gonzaga High School. Al began studying piano and found he could pick out tunes by ear and fit appropriate chords to the melody lines — at least if they were in A flat and E flat. Charles Rinker finally shed himself of the wicked stepmother and her daughter, settling a lot of money on them in the process, at which point Alton and Miles returned home and transferred to North Central High.
Even Mildred briefly returned to Spokane, to sing at Charlie Dale’s speakeasy. Alton was too young to see her work there, but she enthusiastically shared with him her collection of records by an exciting new singer, Ethel Waters. 11 Bing apparently did hear Mildred at Dales, though his recollection of her as “the area’s outstanding singing star” was a substantial exaggeration. She appeared locally only once and was little noted; speakeasies were not reviewed. “She specialized in sultry, throaty renditions with a high concentrate of Southern accent, such as ‘Louisville Lou’ and ‘Hard-Hearted Hannah,’” Bing wrote. 12 She remembered him, too, and in 1941 recalled his early years. “Bing was always a fella to get into trouble,” she said. “I expect he spent every Saturday night of his life in jail. But look at him now. For my money, he’s the best of them all, male or female.” 13
Bob and Clare Pritchard were living with their aunt and uncle, not far from the Rinkers, when they decided they wanted to play music. For Christmas 1922, they received instruments — a C-melody saxophone and tenor banjo — and practiced constantly with Al and Miles, as Al worked up arrangements. After six months they knew six tunes. They drafted Fred Healy on drums, and auditioned him on “Wabash Blues.” He sounded okay, but within a few months the Rinkers and Pritchards had improved, while Healy “couldn’t keep a good beat on his drums.” 14 They broke the news to him and looked elsewhere. Now, with Bing in the group and Miles doubling on clarinet, they rehearsed at Al’s house and played a few high-school dances for money. A student at North Central, Jimmy Heaton, asked if he could play trumpet in the band. Unlike the others, Heaton was an excellent, schooled player; he was the first of the bunch to make a mark in Hollywood, as an ace studio musician. (He played lead trumpet for Alfred Newman on countless 20th Century-Fox scores.)
Heaton gave the small ensemble a brassy spark, encouraging Al to fashion more intricate arrangements. They called themselves the Musicaladers (as in “musical aiders”) and played social gatherings at Odd Fellows Hall, the Elks Club, and the Manito Park Social Club, often with Rinker billed as leader. The Manito job, three dollars a man, was on a Sunday night, and Bing could barely suppress his yawning in law class the next day. His interest in school was fading.
Early in 1924 the band was given a week on the small stage at the Casino Theater and went over well enough to get a repeat engagement. They rented tuxedo jackets and white flannel trousers and thought themselves pros. Bing periodically made his way from the drums to the proscenium to sing such songs as “Alice Blue Gown,” “Margie,” “St. Louis Blues,” and “For Me and My Gal.” Al’s arrangements, adapted from the latest discs, were invariably up-to-date. “Well, he was very good,” Bing said late in life:
He had a great ear for music, he could play pretty near anything after he heard it a time or two, and play the right harmony, too. He’d pick out a part for each instrument. We had piano, banjo, cornet, clarinet, saxophone, and he’d voice all the harmonies for them, just show them the harmonic line to follow, and we’d be playing the same arrangement as on the record. We were quite a novelty around Spokane ’cause we would have arrangements taken from hit records, which we could play. That really made us unique. 15
The Musicaladers would take any job, anyplace. “We were nonunion,” Bing said. “We had no scale, no minimum, no maximum —whatever we could get. It wasn’t much, but you didn’t need much in those days.” 16 One engagement they kept secret was at a second-story Chinese restaurant, the Pekin Cafe, a popular if notorious hangout that trafficked in liquor and prostitution. The Pekin offered the Musicaladers a regular job every Friday and Saturday night for good money. “I was able to allay some of my mother’s doubts about the restaurant’s respectability by pointing to its most respectable financial rewards,” Bing recalled. 17
The fact that Bing was drinking heavily and not always holding it well became obvious one afternoon when he and his friend Edgie Hogle, who tried to manage the Musicaladers, got into trouble. Bing, who had been at Colonel Albert’s office, walked over to Hat Freeman’s hat store, where Edgie clerked. Each put up fifty cents, and Bing walked to an alley a block away where a bootlegger sold dollar pints of popskull, a pernicious moonshine whiskey. Later, back at Hat’s and properly tanked, Bing and Edgie mulled over a vaudeville act they’d seen the previous evening in which a juggler cast hats over the heads of the audience and made them return like boomerangs. By the time the owner returned, four straw hats had sailed out the door. He fired Edgie and banned Bing from the premises.
Bing’s favorite shop, one of his two regular hangouts, was Russ Bailey’s House of Music, a record-and-sheet-music store on the corner of Riverside and Post, next door to the Liberty Theater, Spokane’s first movie house. Ray Grombacher had built the Liberty in 1915 and now owned Bailey s as well. One of his clerks, Johnnie Bulmer, moonlighted as a drummer and led a
band at Liberty Lake. During a late-night waltz, he would focus a light on his bass drum, illuminating a florid sunset that, one observer said, “made Maxfield Parrish’s calendars seem somber.” 18 According to Bulmer, Bing pressed him for help in mastering the latest licks, and Bulmer gave him pointers “to get rid of him.” 19 Bing noted the striped blazer Johnnie wore at the lake and the way he sang ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas” through a megaphone but did not think much of him as a singer. The feeling was mutual. Bing “always looked like a tramp,” 20 Bulmer groused to a reporter in the 1940s, nursing his envy, for though he chased after the big time, he returned to Spokane an overweight and dyspeptic plumber.
Bing’s key interest in Bailey’s, however, was not Bulmer. He would pick up Al after school at North Central, and the two would bring their banjo-ukes to the store, lock themselves in a booth, and listen to records until closing time. “We practically lived there,” Bing recalled. 21 “We used to wait outside Bailey’s music shop for the new records to come in, the Mound City Blue Blowers and the Original Dixieland Band and the Memphis Five and the Cotton Pickers, Jean Goldkette’s band.” 22 Rinker added, “We couldn’t afford to buy [all] the records, so we would buy one, after learning 12 and leave.” 23 Bulmer’s recollection was not as blithe: “They drove us crazy,” he complained. “They’d play some Whiteman stuff over and over, picking up the arrangements by ear. They never spent a dime, so whenever a customer wanted a booth I’d throw them out.” 24 Ralph Goodhue, who managed the store, agreed — he couldn’t recall them ever buying a record in the hundreds of hours they spent in the glass-enclosed listening room. 25 In 1962 Bing called Bailey’s “our jazz classroom.” 26 It became his only classroom.
The student of Cicero, Ovid, and Augustine; the declaimer of Horatius at the Bridge; the incipient minstrel; the energetic athlete and yell leader; the devout altar boy; the promising mirror of a rigorous Jesuit education was slipping out of Gonzaga’s grasp. The law had not suited him. Had Bing continued in the arts and sciences college, he would most likely have graduated, for he had only two or three months remaining of his fourth year when he dropped out. But in the law school, he faced an additional two years. Kate was on his back, complaining about his slipping grades and lapsed attention, and he bridled, telling her he would rather sing than eat. By spring, Bing was earning more money with the Musicaladers than in Colonel Albert’s office and let everyone know it. He saw no contest between following in the footsteps of his uncle George and executing wage-garnishment forms. For weeks he sat in class, whistling under his breath and practicing a paradiddle with pencils on his desktop. He finally told his parents of his decision to withdraw from Gonzaga.
Art Dussault and others tried to change Bing’s mind, but the future star — showing the stubbornness that became fabled during his years in Hollywood — was immovable. He left school with little warning, having posed with twenty-seven other law students for the 1924 Gonzaga yearbook. Everyone in the picture wears a necktie or cravat, except Bing, who wears a bow tie; with his hair neatly pomaded and parted on the left, he looks conspicuously younger than the others. Several years later he remarked, “I studied law in college and I can truthfully say that the bar of the state of Washington is the only bar I was ever kept out of.” 27 Kate was distraught, Harry encouraging.
Bing was prodded to quit school by Rinker, a reluctant student who did badly in high school and disdained scholastic obligations of any kind, especially those that detracted from the business of music. Al’s enthusiasm spurred Bing’s, and the successes they enjoyed mitigated their doubts about the ensemble’s abilities. Their confidence was not warranted. Jimmy Heaton was the only instrumentalist with real talent. Al’s golden ear did not increase his skill on piano, and Bings musicality was at best unfocused. What kept them running, said an observer, “was their devoted love of jazz and brass balls.” 28 They had discovered the great secret of America’s new popular music: it let everyone in, even those lacking musical education or conventional technique. All you needed was passion, ambition, a good ear. Rinker and Crosby had all three. Creativity would come later.
The Musicaladers belonged to the first generation of young Americans who bought into the Zeitgeist of American popular music through records and a few traveling bands. Among the orchestra leaders passing through Spokane, Vic Meyers, Dwight Johnson, and Abe Lyman spiced their fox-trots and waltzes with jazz. If the captivating new sound was difficult to play well in its toddling stage (only a fraction of the jazz records made during the mid-1920s stand up), it was easy to play badly. The form was methodical, the harmony simple, the rhythm steady — especially as diluted under the Whiteman influence.
With time on their hands in 1924, Bing’s gang found another hangout besides Bailey’s — Benny Stubeck’s Confectionary, which would become a familiar name to Bing’s radio audience. Stubeck, a short, stout Bohemian, ran a corner luncheonette that sold newspapers and tobacco. Though Bing retained warm memories of the shop, its owner remembered him and his light-fingered friends with more tolerance than joy. In 1937 the thirty-four-year-old Bing wrote Stubeck a letter admitting that he had stolen Hershey bars from his store and agreeing to pay up if the bill did not exceed three dollars. Stubeck did not send an invoice, as he explained to a reporter: “What the hell, so he now owes me three bucks. He pays me off with publicity. Christ, he’s mentioned me fifty or a hundred times on the radio. You heard it, ain’t you, saying he’s broadcasting from Benny Stubeck’s poolroom? Always the clown.” Benny recalled Bing as a guy ready with his fists, though not the type to look for a confrontation. “They was all the time getting into fights,” either because they were refused entry to a cabaret or because they were “drunker’n skunks on moonshine” or because of girls. “They was always chasing the chickens,” getting “clapped up,” and coming to Benny, who discreetly arranged for them to see a doctor. 29
Bing’s willingness to fight is much affirmed. On one occasion, a heckler called out, “Hi, pansy,” while he was singing “Peggy O’Neil,” and Bing leaped off the bandstand and chased him outside, where the police intervened. 30 His fondness for adolescent whoring is less well documented, but it may help explain Bing’s widely noted lack of interest in routine dating. The name of only one Crosby girlfriend from the period has come to light, and that because thirty years later her six-year-old nephew sidled up to Bing at Idaho’s Hayden Lake Country Club. As the boy stared up at him, Bing engaged him in conversation and was told that the boy’s aunt Dorothy had been his girlfriend and that the family scrapbook was filled with pictures of them. As the nephew, Jack Sheehan, remembered many years later, Bing responded, “I’ve had affection for lots of pretty ladies, Junior. So you’ve got the goods on me, eh?” A moment later Bing turned to him: “Is your aunt Dorothy Bresnan?” He wrote a note on the back of his scorecard, which was found among Dorothy’s possessions when she died in 1973:
Dear Dorothy,
Greetings to you and yours. I certainly remember you as a lovely girl. I recall the park dance we attended after you were named May Queen. I’m at the lake for a short spell with the boys. They are becoming excellent golfers. Your nephew is a fine young man, not at all shy. All good wishes to you. Love, Bing. 31
The scrapbook suggested to Sheehan that the two-year relationship was serious. He surmised that it took place during Bing’s final year at Gonzaga and the ensuing one with the Musicaladers. Rinker recalled nothing of the kind, objecting rather primly that Bing “never seemed to get emotionally involved with girls he dated.” With Bing, everything was “on a casual fun basis.” 32
For Al, considering his youth, Stubeck’s was a pretty heady experience. He and Bob Pritchard were included in Bing’s adventures because they were in the band and liked to hang out with him. Al remembered the older boys bringing moonshine and partying with local girls (“not what you would call debutantes”) who were considered daring just for taking a swig. 33 Al got sick once, but Bing could usually hold it. Already known for his “sporty hats and fas
t quips,” Bing was much admired for his wit, his singing, and his ability to consume rotgut whiskey at a time when Prohibition made drinking a pastime and a sport. Stubeck was not impressed. “Jeez, that was one wild bunch of clowns, always broke,” Benny groused. 34 They kept a jug in his basement, where he allowed the band to rehearse, and at closing time he sometimes found them down there stiff as boards. Benny obviously had a soft spot for Bing and his friends. He was an agent for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and some nights he piled them into the PI truck and drove them home “so they wouldn’t get pinched.” “Goddamn good customers,” Benny later recalled of Crosby and his friends. “Jesus Christ, I can still remember that Bing when he’d walk in and holler, ‘Give me a couple of greasy hamburgers and a malted milk/” 35 Stubeck claimed that Bing later offered him a position with Bing Crosby, Inc.
The Musicaladers’ best and steadiest job followed directly from their scandalous appearances at the Pekin Cafe, where George Lareida Jr. heard them. Lareida and his father co-owned the newly established, hugely successful Lareida’s Dance Pavilion in Dishman, six miles east of Spokane. George Sr. wasn’t overwhelmed by the band at first, but he was duly impressed when an itinerant vaudevillian dropped by for the last show and said of Bing, “That kid’s really got something.” 36 He asked the boys whether they would be interested in working at his place three nights a week. Lareida Jr. recalled Bing blurting out, “Boy, would we!” The Pavilion was an immense and well-run operation in a hangar of a building (formerly an auto showroom, later a roller-skating rink), where the area’s young people went to socialize and dance; it was the first stop on the train out of Spokane. As the band required a car to make its thrice-weekly trips for the summerlong engagement, the six members contributed four or five dollars each to the purchase of a 1916 Model T Ford, without top or windshield.