Bing Crosby Page 13
The bandstand was situated on a platform in the middle of the hall, and everyone danced around it. When Bing sang a ballad, obscuring his face with the megaphone, kids stopped and stared. The repertoire included fox-trots, waltzes, and tangos but was unusually abundant with blues — “St. Louis Blues,” “Beale Street Blues,” “The Wang Wang Blues,” “Stack-o-lee Blues.” Lareida’s was the one place Spokane’s parents generally endorsed. Prohibition was strictly enforced by the teetotaling owners. Anyone who entered the Pavilion intoxicated was asked to leave; bouncers made sure they did. George Lareida and his father allowed for one exception. They knew Bing often drank before he arrived, but Lareida Sr. tolerated his tippling because he rarely let it show. The son knew better, having found Bing passed out in the men’s room near the urinals. “Wake up, you bum, you’ve got to play tonight,” he yelled at him. Bing came to, realized where he was, and grimaced, “Hey, who brung them roses.” 37
On one occasion Bing fell off the bandstand, as he was reminded ten years later, when he wagered a Seattle businessman over the outcome of a fight between a fellow named Handy and a boxer Bing presumably owned an interest in. The businessman wrote Bing that he had met someone from Spokane who offered to “make a little side bet that [Handy] at least doesn’t fall off the platform such as in the instance of one of your early crooning experiences at Lareida’s Dance Pavilion, Spokane, years ago. Should I cover this bet for you, or should I just let it drop?” 38 Bing’s response is not known.
Bing was indulged because he was liked. Lareida thought Al “cold and even a little haughty” but enjoyed Bing and called him the Lip in tribute to his nonstop verbal dexterity. 39 “When you see Bing chewing the fat with [Bob] Hope,” he said, “that’s the fellow he was.” 40 The Musicaladers, excepting Heaton, posed for a photograph used in Lareida’s ads. For his first important publicity shot, Bing sat up front beside a tom-tom, holding Miles Rinker’s clarinet, wearing the band’s latest uniform, a loud, high-buttoned striped blazer and bow tie, smiling boyishly. Seated next to him is Clare Pritchard with his banjo. Bob Pritchard, his alto in hand, stands to Clare’s right, his left leg crooked back like a chorine’s. Behind them, in darker striped jackets and bow ties, are Miles with his alto and Al, the youngest of the five, looking the most mature. The aggressive glint in Al’s eyes contrasts with the smiling cherubs around him. They look pleased, despite their uniformly scuffed shoes. But their appeal to dancers proved unexceptional, and the job led to few others. On the day of Bing’s death, George Lareida said, “He was an awful nice fellow”: through all the intervening years, Bing had never failed to send him a Christmas card. 41
The Musicaladers lasted about eighteen weeks at Lareida’s, and they never had another job remotely as good. But they kept plugging until the spring of 1925, though exactly how the year after their biggest engagement was spent is lost to memory. Bing and Al ignore it in their accounts, published and unpublished, skipping directly to the dissolution of the band. After Lareida’s, Bing wrote, the band skirted by with “whatever we could get” — that is, whatever Edgie Hogle could line up, mostly dances and parties. That the group was losing its steam is clear. It must have been a trying year for Bing, the only member of the band with time to burn. Al was on the verge of flunking out of school, but the others — except Heaton, who had the promise of band work in Los Angeles — were bound for college. Bing hired on as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway, yet continued to spend much of his time hanging around North Central, trying to generate interest in rehearsals and work. Except for Al, the other guys were more concerned with graduating.
Other than Frank Corkery, according to the account by Ted and Larry, Bing now socialized mostly with boys at North Central. Among his drinking partners, Dirk Crabbe best shared his sense of humor and verbal inventiveness. Benny Stubeck’s and Russ Bailey’s occupied many days, and vaudeville and silent movies occupied many evenings. The first recordings by Bennie Moten out of Kansas City arrived at the shop and became great favorites for a few weeks. Al’s home life improved: his father remarried, this time to a “lovely” widow from Stockholm with a conservatory background, who schooled Al in classical music. 42 But Al gravitated to the Crosby home, where he grew fond of Catherine and Mary Rose, whom he had known slightly at school. He recalled that the Crosby house was sparsely furnished, a reflection, he surmised, of the difficulty Mr. Crosby had making ends meet. Al liked Harry (“His dad was anything-goes, a nice guy, Irish guy”), 43 but not Kate (“a real matriarch, ugh, very strict disciplinarian on Catholicism”) 44 He and Bing practiced at the piano, and Bing surprised him by comfortably singing E and F, high for a baritone.
By spring 1925 the band was kaput. After graduation, Jimmy Heaton moved to Los Angeles. Miles was heading for the University of Illinois, and the Pritchards were planning to attend Washington State; all had lost interest in being Musicaladers. “Bing and I were left alone,” Al ruminated. 45 They became avid golfers, playing with old wood-shafted irons, hickory-shafted woods, and repainted golf balls on a public course at Downriver Park. Al was seventeen and Bing almost twenty-two. For two dollars each, they bought the Model T from the other four boys and stored it in a vacant lot adjacent to the Crosby house. George Lareida was under the impression that they planned to leave Spokane in the spring (he recalled his father giving the boys tires for the trip) but thought they changed their minds when they landed a job at the Clemmer Theater. His memory is not supported by other accounts, however, and the possibility seems unlikely, because Bing and Al had not yet figured out what to do musically in the absence of a band. They learned that at the Clemmer.
Doc Clemmer’s theater, at Sprague and Lincoln, had become something of a Spokane institution in the ten years since it was built. The Clemmer was the city’s second movie theater, dated only by Ray Grombacher’s Liberty, which had opened four weeks earlier. A square four-story building in the neoclassical style of 1915, enviably located across from the luxurious Davenport Hotel, its ornamented off-white brick facade and pillars masked an elaborate interior. Howard S. Clemmer, a dentist turned showman, believed a theater had moral responsibilities and in 1918 persuaded Spokane County to ban The Birth of a Nation as “detrimental to the best ends of patriotism.” 46 He was much admired for his policy of “juvenile edification” and his Saturday-morning children’s hour never failed to attract less than a capacity audience of 900. He wrote and published The Klemerklink, a loose-leaf illustrated book that he handed out a page per week to the kids as part of the nickel admission. Doc was a character. He was concerned about redheaded boys, whom he believed bore a “cross of affliction.” His Red-Head Club offered free admission and transportation to and from the theater to preteens who suffered that malady; he hired only redheaded boys as ushers. When their ranks were thinned by the war, he announced his willingness to hire redheaded girls, but that drastic step was averted when an official of the YMCA advised him of the surfeit of unemployed boys. 47
Clemmer had little use for live entertainment, especially jazz. His impact on Bing’s life was significant but entirely circumstantial: in March of 1925, just as the Musicaladers were disbanding and Bing and Al were turning to golf, he and his silent partner sold the theater to Universal Pictures. If he had not made the sale, it is almost certain that Bing and Al would have gone separate ways, with what effect on American popular music one can scarcely imagine.
Universal took over on May 1, installing R. R. (Roy) Boomer as manager and approving expenses for a new marquee, carpet, and lighting. 48 Boomer was brought in from San Francisco, where a combination of vaudeville and movies was fashionable. In Spokane he was considered, in Bing’s words, “a progressive type, for stage shows were pioneer stuff then.” 49 The gala May 9 reopening offered Universal’s The Phantom of the Opera and a few live acts. Boomer had been scouting for local talent to provide entr’actes between pictures. Bing and Al heard about his inquiries and were determined to audition. But what could they do? They had no band and little confidence
in themselves as a duo. Neither one suggested the obvious: a voice-andpiano team. Instead, they drafted three pals, including a boy soprano, and offered themselves as a vocal group, with Al playing piano in the pit. Boomer took them on, assigned them songs, and staged them before a Norwegian tableau.
Boomer proved to have the vision Crosby and Rinker lacked. He tired of their act and fired all the singers save one. “Why, I don’t know,” Al wrote half a century later. “I guess he saw something in Bing. Perhaps his singing and personality.” 50 Boomer also retained Al as accompanist. In what amounted to a shotgun wedding, Bing and Al were finally forced to come up with an act on their own. This time Boomer did not assign them songs; he allowed them to choose. As much as they needed the job, Bing was nervous about accepting it. He had never before sung to paying customers on an otherwise bare stage.
For their first show, with Al in the pit, Bing walked out and delivered a reasonably assured rendition of “Red-Hot Henry Brown,” a new tune they had picked up from records by the prolific Irving Kaufman and the Ray Miller Orchestra (including C-melody saxophonist Frank Trumbauer and pianist Tom Satterfield, who two years later would be their bandmates). The audience responded encouragingly, and Bing proceeded with a ballad, “Save Your Sorrow (for Tomorrow),” taken from another Ray Miller record (lyric by Buddy DeSylva, a Jolson songwriter who went on to produce Going My Way). The ballad relaxed him, allowing him to purr and trill his high notes, and the reception was warmer still. After two more songs, Bing left the stage, applause ringing in his ears. Boomer was satisfied and told Bing he had the job.
During the next week or so, Bing sang the same songs show after show, but he never got used to having the stage to himself. Everything about his musical drive (the polyphony of jazz) and wit (the banter of vaudeville) demanded a partner he could engage in harmony or horseplay. The situation at hand was more like the sodality meetings at which he sang “One Fleeting Hour.” At parties, he and Al had often sung together: Why couldn’t they do that now? They would work out a few routines, inject more pizzazz into the show. Bing was so insistent that Boomer agreed to give them a try. But they could not put the piano on the stage, as it would interfere with the projection of movies. Since the pit was shallow, almost level with the orchestra seats, Bing came down from the stage.
Until this point, Bing and Al had worked chiefly from the music of others, copying arrangements and adapting them to the instrumentation of the Musicaladers or offering a conventional recital of familiar songs. Their most fanciful performances had taken place at parties. Invariably, their audiences were dancing, drinking, or otherwise distracted. At the Clemmer, none of the usual formulas would avail. They had to devise an act. Situated with the stage at their backs and an audience out front waiting for the movie to begin, they were expected to fill some fifteen or twenty minutes. What did they perform? Al thought the numbers included “Mary Lou,” “Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home,” and “I’m Gonna Charleston Back to Charleston,” but he probably confused the 1925 Clemmer engagement with one a year later at the Liberty. (The first two songs were published in the interim.) “I’m Gonna Charleston” may have figured in the Clemmer shows, though not at the beginning; a favorite of bass saxophonist Adrian Rollini, who recorded three versions that summer, the little-remembered song was cowritten by Roy Turk, among whose subsequent hits was Bing’s theme, “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.” Whatever they sang, they went over big. Al said Boomer told them, “You guys are great. Let’s keep it this way.” 51 He paid each of them thirty dollars a week.
They continued for nearly five months at the Clemmer. One of the most ornately detailed theaters in the Northwest, the place was an acoustical gem ideally suited to Bing’s particular vocal projection. A blue, purple, and gray fretwork board — touched with gilt, suspended by wires, and thought to be the first of its kind in any theater — focused the sound while concealing the organ loft and its four-manual, 3,000-pipe Kimball pneumatic organ. The mammoth instrument, which could simulate the range of a forty-four-piece orchestra, was used for intermission solos, recitals, and movie scores. 52 The celebrated Jesse Crawford had played the Clemmer organ from 1915 until 1917, before moving on to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood and the Paramount in New York. While Bing and Al were in residence, the instrument was temporarily silenced.
From where the two performers stood, in the pocket of a gently dipping auditorium, they saw a perfect dollhouse enclosure illuminated by no fewer than 1,600 incandescent lamps. Directly above the orchestra was a splendid teal dome ornamented with octagons in gold and beige against a burgundy ceiling. Designer E. W. Houghton had generously dabbed the entire structure with vivid effects and colors. The vestibuled rotunda glimmered with hidden lighting. The floor was a tiled mosaic, the wainscoting marble, the chairs in the eight balconied boxes Austrian oak upholstered in mulberry velour. The “women’s retiring room” was furnished with Louis XIV pieces, blue Wilton carpet, cretonne draperies, a telephone desk, and a davenport, lit by beams from alabaster urns trimmed with ivory. Men were relegated to a basement smoking room, situated below the stage, which doubled as a dressing room for performers.
In this setting, Bing and Al gradually honed an act. Al did not have a distinctive voice. He tended to sing high, from the throat rather than from the diaphragm. But he had drive and accurate pitch, and the more the two rehearsed, the more adept they became at harmonizing. They were making it up as they went along, with few examples to follow. Quartet singing had developed out of standard barbershop blends, reaching a popular apex in the recordings of the Peerless Quartet. But the jazzy requirements of an impromptu duet left them to their own devices. The devices they knew best included the hotcha burbling of Ukelele Ike, the florid emoting of Al Jolson, the guttural attack of the blues, and the sentimental wailing of Irish tenors. The minstrel traditions allowed them to try on the masks of black and southern singing, but they were smart enough to distinguish masks from life. In life, they were a couple of young Northwestern Catholics with smooth voices and much energy who had seen very little of the world.
Bing saw no conflict between the blues and Irish tenors, nor was he hampered by a bias in one direction or the other. His key attribute as a troubadour of American song was his capacious appreciation for its diversity, his disposition to follow music wherever it led. He knew instinctively that as long as he kept in mind who he was, he could make any style his own. Al emulated his lead, blending his thin baritone against Bing’s poised baritone. Soon they developed a presentation unlike any other. They were buoyant, ingenuous, youthfully appealing.
The adventurous team attempted many variations, encouraged by the generous support of the Clemmer audience, which often included old friends like Art Dussault, who came with a contingent of Gonzagans to cheer them on. 53 Bing brought his drums along once, but that didn’t work. Eventually, he eliminated the traps except for a stand-up cymbal. They used kazoos on some pieces and worked up a primitive style of unison scat — a da-de-ta da-de-ta — that was rhythmic and novel. Tenors ruled the theater circuit in part because their high, keening voices could easily reach the balcony’s last row. Bing had his megaphone but soon realized that the Clemmer’s acoustics obviated its need. Besides, people wanted to see his face. The personableness that delighted Bing’s friends readily translated to the stage. Bing and Al had plenty of pep, but they also had something most tyro performers lack: charm. They represented Jazz Age bravura in an unthreatening incarnation while offering contemporaries a musical style of their own. When Bing wrapped his gorgeous voice around a ballad, he made familiar lyrics sound fresh and original.
Most of their songs were not familiar. With Bailey’s music shop at their disposal, they prided themselves on learning the latest numbers as soon as they arrived in town. Immediately after Gene Austin introduced (on a double-sided smash hit) “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” and “Sleepy Time Gal,” Bing and Al adapted and performed them. Wilbur Hindley, drama editor of the Spokesman-R
eview in the 1920s, remembered: “The team of Rinker and Crosby rapidly built up a substantial following. They were often heard at the old Clemmer Theater where they were great favorites — good looking, pleasant appearing chaps with ingratiating smiles and an original method of putting over their songs.” 54 Yet for every song they used to showcase their growing skill and enterprise, they were required by management to do another to set the mood for the picture show. Bing described that type of song as a “prologue”: a sea chanty for a sea movie, a cowboy song for a western, an exotic aria for a movie depicting Hindustan or Araby. 55 The boys were responsible for finding such tunes, and the exercise proved valuable to Bing, increasing his store of and respect for diverse material. In his 1941 movie Birth of the Blues, Bing re-created the Clemmer experience, crooning “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” with an illustrative slide projected on a screen.
The Clemmer had other live entertainment in those months, including singing and jazz piano contests with which Bing and Al had no connection. The most renowned entertainer to perform was the female impersonator Julian Eltinge, whose only appearance in a sound film was facilitated by Bing (along with that of several other faded vaudevillians he admired in his early years) in his 1940 picture, If I Had My Way Still, by October Roy Boomer and Universal Pictures had decided to return to a movies-only policy. The mid-1920s were among the most successful in Hollywood history. The Jazz Age introduced a new style in picture stars; in addition to the abidingly popular Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Pickford, there was sexy Clara Bow and virtuous Colleen Moore, sleek Rudolph Valentino and scary Lon Chaney. Theater managers needed no come-ons to keep their patrons loyal and satisfied.