Bing Crosby Page 4
Given the eight-and-a-half-year gap between the births of Frank and Harry, each may be said to have been raised virtually as an only child, but it was the younger who became a provincial dandy. Pampered by servants throughout his childhood, Harry was by all accounts a guileless young man, lighthearted and informal, unburdened by ambition, hail-fellow-well-met — in short, a model for the character Bing Crosby would bring to movies in the 1930s. He was appealing in a ruddy, moonfaced way, favoring broad suspenders and a rakishly tilted straw hat, and he loved music. Accompanying himself on mandolin or a four-string guitar, Harry sang old favorites made popular by roving minstrel troupes, newer novelty songs and ballads, Chinese ditties learned from the Asian servants his mother had brought home from the Orient, and Gilbert and Sullivan. The Mikado was the rage of the 1890s, and a cousin of Harry’s, Sam Woodruff, famously toured the Northwest as Koko.
Harry sang with an Olympia-based men’s choir, the Peep-O’-Day Boys, and played in the city’s silver cornet band at about the time Kate Harrigan was singing in a Tacoma church choir. In 1890, after dropping out of college, Harry moved to Tacoma, where Frank lived, and found work as a bookkeeper for the Northern Pacific Railroad’s Land Department. For three years he lived in a string of hotels and rooming houses, but his bachelor days were numbered when he encountered the stabilizing glint-eyed gaze of Miss Harrigan appearing in a department-store theatrical.
From the first, they seemed oddly matched, a devout Catholic courted by a casual Protestant. Kate was a willful, disciplined young woman who distrusted luck and abhorred sloth. Harry was incapable of raising his voice and trusted less to Providence or God than to goodwill and serendipity. In time, she would come to be characterized as humorless, even autocratic. He never lost the epithet earned as a young man, Happy Harry — though it was amended much later to Hollywood Harry. The women employed in Bing Crosby’s offices were more bemused than offended by Dad Crosby’s fanny-pinching, in light of Mother Crosby’s temperament, which brought everyone, including her sons, to solemn attention.
Music may have sealed their courtship, but Harry’s willingness to convert to Catholicism made possible their marriage. He established a standard other non-Catholics would be expected to uphold as a precondition to marrying into the family. The wedding took place in a small wooden church, Holy Rosary, on January 4, 1894, and the couple moved directly into the hotel — St. John House — in which Harry boarded. Within weeks they acquired their first of several houses in the alphabetically configured city. Located in the “backwoods” area of N Street, 14 this house came to Kate’s mind fifty years later when a writer solicited her Mother’s Day recollections. “One of my warmest Mother’s Day memories goes back to before the children were even born,” she said, “back to the day when their father and I knew we had established a home for them, a place warm and livable, and I could close my eyes and imagine them there.” 15
3
TACOMA
There are literally millions of Crosby relatives around these parts.
— Burt McMurtrie, columnist (1948) 1
Kate Crosby wouldn’t have to imagine for long. She was expecting when she and Harry moved into the house at 616 South N Street. On the third day of the New Year, 1895, Laurence Earl was born at home. Before the year was out, they moved to a better neighborhood, near Wright Park, and a bigger house to accommodate Harry’s mother, Cordelia, who lived with them for a few months. In that house, at 110 North Yakima, a second son, Everett Nathaniel, was born on April 5, 1896. The family’s fortunes changed when Harry lost his job with the Northern Pacific and was forced to scuffle for work through the depression years of 1897 and 1898. His plight may account for the four-year pause before more children arrived. The Crosbys moved twice more, never beyond the radius of a few blocks in the residential district just north of downtown Tacoma.
Harry’s luck changed in 1899, when he was hired as a clerk in the Pierce County treasurer’s office, under Treasurer Stephen Judson, who had been one of the Washington pioneers of the 1850s. 2 The family was now able to rent a handsome three-story, many-gabled corner house at 922 North I Street, where their third son, Edward John, was born on July 30, 1900. Judson was defeated in the Republican sweep of 1902, but his successor, John B. Reed, promoted Harry to bookkeeper. That December Harry celebrated his good fortune by purchasing, for $850, two adjoining lots on J Street, between North Eleventh and North Twelfth, with the intention of building a residence he estimated would cost $2,500. 3 The deed was made out to his wife, who could never feel truly settled in a rental.
Construction at 1112 North J was completed ten months later, in the first weeks of a cold winter. Set on a grassy incline from the street, the wooden two-story frame house had wide eaves and a large front porch with three sets of double columns supporting a roof porch just below the second-story bedroom windows. Harry and Kate permitted themselves the luxury of a piano. Down the street they could see Puget Sound, and only three blocks away stood St. Patrick’s, the small wooden church that had served the community for a dozen years and where Edward (Ted) was baptized.
Kate was pregnant again during the construction, with a due date in mid-spring. As the day approached, the stinging April winds suddenly departed and she delivered her fourth son on Sunday, May 3, which the Daily Ledger declared AN IDEAL SUMMER DAY. 4
Kate, who had just turned thirty, and Harry, finally established in the city’s middle class, decided that this boy’s arrival merited a public announcement. For the first time, they alerted the newspapers of a newborn. When the Daily Ledger failed to print the item in “City News in Brief” until May 5, implying with the word yesterday that the great event had taken place on May 4, 5 Kate stipulated the correct date for its rival, the Tacoma Daily News(“Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Crosby are receiving congratulations on the arrival of a son at their household May 3”), 6 and requested a correction from the Ledger, which appeared on May 7. 7
On May 31, accompanied by Kate’s younger brother Frank and his wife (the boy’s godparents), Harry and Kate carried the infant to St. Patrick’s for his baptism. 8 Harry was disappointed at not having a girl, but Kate placated him by naming the boy after him. For his middle name, however, she chose Lillis, after a neighborhood friend, circumventing a generational ranking of senior and junior (though both Harrys would often use those designations). Happy Harry cradled the infant in his arms, looked into blue eyes that would never darken, and gave forth in song, “Ten Baby Fingers and Ten Baby Toes.” 9
For all the decisiveness with which May 3, 1903, was flagged as Harry Lillis Crosby’s birthday, the date proved controversial in and out of family circles. 10 In all official accounts (generated by Paramount, Decca, the Crosby offices, and, most insistently, Bing himself), it was altered by one day and one year, to May 2, 1904. The true date was additionally obscured as two of his older brothers came to believe he was born in 1901. Bing lost the year early in his career at the conniving of Everett, who, acting as his manager, believed he was shaving three.
The first of young Harry’s two younger sisters, Catherine Cordelia, named after her mother and her recently deceased grandmother, arrived on October 3, 1904. 11 The second, Mary Rose, with whom Harry developed a particular childhood affinity, followed on May 3, 1906. That Kate delivered four of her six children on the third day of the month is merely an actuarial oddity; that she delivered two on the same day of the same month created birthday havoc, as Mary Rose insisted on having the day to herself. 12 Peace prevailed when Harry’s birthday was advanced by twenty-four hours. In later years Mary Rose would triumphantly produce the family Bible in which their father assigned Harry May 2.
By the time Mary Rose arrived, the family fortunes had once again bottomed out. Harry Crosby’s benefactor, John B. Reed, was ousted in the 1904 election by his former cashier, Edgar M. Lakin, who advanced Harry to the title of deputy in the county treasurer’s office. 13 Of the eight men working in the treasurer’s office, Harry had been there the longest. Yet he was fired l
ate in 1905, presumably so that Lakin could reward a political crony. After several more firings, complaints that city employees were being dismissed on trumped-up charges grew widespread. In April 1906 the citizens of Tacoma approved a city charter amendment requiring a public hearing and ratification by a two-thirds majority of the city council before a city employee could be discharged.
The city’s indignation came too late to help Harry. In the first years of the century, Tacoma’s population had exploded from 38,000 to more than 84,000, but the expected fiscal boom was not forthcoming. 14 The economy was stymied by the consolidation of the timber industry and railroads. The increase in jobs did not keep up with the number of job hunters. Like many others disappointed with prospects on the coast, Harry began to think about the inland frontier and its burgeoning center, Spokane, 200 miles east, where logging and mining camps were proliferating as fast as they once had in Tacoma. The prospect of a fresh start was made more imperative by Harry’s liberal spending.
The very week he was fired, he had come home with tickets for The Merry Widow, insisting that they had been given him by a friend. He and Kate “enjoyed every minute of the show,” Ted recounted in a fanciful biography of Bing, noting with lingering embarrassment that Harry’s “sprees” exacerbated “their financial troubles on the Coast.” 15 Just how much embarrassment and debt Harry incurred is no longer possible to ascertain, but given Kate’s keen sense of social standing, such difficulties may have sparked her own willingness to leave their home, friends, parents, and siblings, especially her sister, Annie, whose prospering marriage made Kate more envious than she liked to admit. Bing would later praise his father’s hunch in recognizing Spokane as “a fine place for a man to raise his family,” 16 but he hinted at a darker motive in lauding it as a place where the people “don’t care who you are, what you’ve been, or what your reputation was before they met you. It’s how you handle yourself after you arrive there that counts.” 17
Within a week of his dismissal, Harry was visiting Spokane, soon to become one of the world’s great wheat centers. Where wheat is harvested, distilleries and breweries are sure to follow, and Harry landed a job as bookkeeper at the newly developed Inland Brewery. Harry sold the house on J Street to Annie and her husband, Ed Walsh, for a dollar. 18 The nominal figure may indicate the settlement of a debt or the intention to resume ownership at a future date. The Walshes never lived in the house but held on to it for many years before selling.
Harry had to begin work immediately, but Kate was in the last weeks of a difficult pregnancy with Mary Rose and could not withstand the long, jolting rail trip. So he went alone, securing the rental of a roomy four-bedroom house in Spokane’s Catholic district and fortifying it with furniture shipped from J Street. Kate and the children moved into a furnished house on South I Street, half a mile from their abandoned home and a couple of blocks from the austere box-frame house in which Annie and Ed Walsh lived and where the children could be distracted. Everett was charged with watching Harry until Mary Rose was safely delivered, though Kate remained ill and in bed for two months.
By early July Kate felt her strength returning, or recognized that the trip could be put off no longer. She said her good-byes and in the grueling midsummer heat transported herself, the baby, the five older children, and several valises to the station. They almost missed the train when the combative Everett disappeared to pursue an altercation with a newsboy. But he was located in time, and the seven Crosbys boarded the Northern Pacific, bound for the Inland Empire.
The times were changing as the Crosbys pulled up roots. The week Spokane’s Inland Brewery announced the expansion that made Harry’s job possible, a prankster in Chicago yelled “fire” outside a church during the Easter service, inciting a stampede that took the lives of four parishioners, three of them children; and a mob of 5,000 in Springfield, Missouri, destroyed a prison and hanged and burned three black teenagers accused of attacking a white woman, despite the woman’s assertion that they were not the culprits. (The mob inadvertently freed nearly forty white bona fide criminals, causing a panic throughout the area.) Three days later, at 5:13 A.M., a fierce rumbling woke San Francisco to the ordeal that demolished the city and stoked fires that raged for three days, taking a thousand lives and leaving 250,000 homeless — the nation’s worst disaster since the Johnstown flood of 1889.
It was the era in which Lincoln Steffens damned the shame of the cities and Upton Sinclair revealed that the bodies of Chicago meatpackers who drowned in mixing vats were processed with diseased cows and brought to market. New York tabloids ballyhooed the first of many “crimes of the century.” after a deranged wastrel, Harry K. Thaw, defended the honor of his wife, showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, by murdering the architect and libertine Stanford White. His attorneys argued that Thaw suffered from “dementia Americana,” and his millions bought him several stays in a mental hospital while Nesbit augured talk-show renown by ventilating her cautionary tale on the vaudeville circuit.
And yet despite unreasoning fears and exploding racial and ethnic hatred, it was an era of heroes — of larger-than-life people who were honored without the slightest taint of cynical apprehension: builders, explorers, educators, thinkers, rebels, scientists, tinkerers, politicians, industrialists, labor leaders. The Spokesman-Review, the major Inland paper, published a front-page poll in which regional educators, intellectuals, and writers were asked to name the five greatest contemporary Americans. 19 The same men turned up on ballot after ballot: Teddy Roosevelt topped them all, followed by Thomas A. Edison, Charles W. Eliot, Edward Everett Hale, Andrew Carnegie, William Jennings Bryan, Booker T. Washington, Luther Burbank, Samuel Gompers, J. Pierpont Morgan. These men embodied the American character, enhanced the American profile, avowed an American century. Spokane fit the bill; after driving out the Palouse Indians in 1905, the city sprang forward.
4
SPOKANE
Nicknames are indicative of a change from a given to an achieved identity and they tell us something of the nick named individual’s interaction with his fellows.
— Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1964) 1
Old Spokane, called Spokane Falls, was little more than a post for trading with the Spokane and Couer d’Alene Indians. When the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived, the settlement boomed overnight, attracting the Wild West’s familiar warring elements — “respectable” people, including mining barons, and transient loggers, miners, and other laborers lured by liquor, gambling, and prostitution. The hell-raisers had access to opium, provided by Chinese who had been brought in to lay track and were then forced to live in the town’s dark back alleys. The values of the more conservative city fathers began to win out in 1889, the year Washington won statehood, when a fire razed thirty-two blocks of the rowdy downtown district. The townsmen set about rebuilding the city, using red brick and cast iron instead of wood. They imported architects with a taste for terra-cotta. Ordinances were passed to make life harder for those who did not fit in. “Box” theaters, which provided whores and whiskey in balconied boxes, were banned; saloons were shuttered on Sundays.
Spokane {Falls was dropped in 1891) flourished as the commercial hub of the Inland Empire, a wintergreen and dun-colored expanse that wrapped its 150 miles around scores of towns, agricultural and mineral riches, forests and streams, seventeen lakes, a rushing river, and falls that were claimed to rival Niagara. 2 The opening of the railway, in 1881, and the Coeur d’Alene gold rush, two years later, transformed the city and its surroundings. But the Northern Pacific’s encroaching yards and warehouses spread over Spokane like a blotting shadow, overtaking the riverfront and ultimately sealing the city from its breathtaking views of falls and rapids. 3
Yet “the Bond which Unites us with the Rest of the World,” 4 as the Northern Pacific characterized itself, brought Spokane undeniable dominance east of the Cascades. The population, which numbered 350 in 1880, had grown to nearly 100,000 by 1906, when Kate Crosby and her children, exhausted and distempered from
the blistering heat and rattling journey, stepped from the train into a streaked sunset and saw Harry, smiling in his straw hat beside a rented horse and wagon, eager to show them their new home.
The driver helped load the valises and, turning the wagon north, retraced much of the route Harry took from work every day on the trolley, back through the business district and across the Spokane River to the residential areas. They proceeded east of Division Street, the baseline from which avenues are numbered, to a developing working-class enclave known as the Holy Land, for its Catholic churches, schools, convent, seminary, and orphanage. When they reached the yellow two-story house at 303 East Sinto Avenue, Harry unlocked the door and switched on an electric light, a convenience they had not enjoyed in Tacoma. He pointed out the carefully installed furniture, the groceries, the indoor plumbing.
As the luggage was carried inside, Kate collapsed onto a chair in the living room. The older boys explored the upstairs bedrooms where they would double up — Larry and Everett in one room, Ted and Harry in another, Catherine and the baby in the third. Their parents slept downstairs in a room off the main area. Harry knew the reunion occasioned as much resignation as cheer. In a 1937 account Ted and Larry describe Kate as a woman who renounced self-pity about what she had left behind; she had “acquiesced in her husband’s decision to start anew” and considered herself a pioneer now. 5 In later years, however, she complained to Bing that they had arrived with “very short funds” and ran high food and fuel bills, while her husband breezily dismissed her financial worries. 6