Bing Crosby Read online

  Even the entertainment world rallied. After city officials banned box and variety theaters, performers were engaged to lure skeptical customers into nickelodeons that were little more than converted storefronts. The first significant theater in Spokane was the Auditorium, built in 1890, with the second-largest stage west of Minneapolis. It presented musicals, operas, concerts, and dramas. The more daring Pantages and Washington theaters offered traveling vaudeville. At the outset of 1915, two movie theaters, the Liberty and the Clemmer, opened their doors. The Spokesman-Review crowed, “It is doubtful if any city the size of Spokane can boast of two such moving picture theaters.” 27

  In this environment, and with the financial help of Inland Brewery, the ever optimistic Crosbys believed they could finally realize the dream of building their own home in Spokane. Kate got the ball rolling. In June 1911 the Pioneer Educational Society (a Jesuit organization) sold her, “for the sum of one dollar and other considerations,” a lot on East Sharp Avenue with a proviso that the buyer erect a “dwelling house worth not less than three thousand dollars.” 28 Within weeks Inland Brewery bought the warranty deed for $6,500, enabling Kate and Harry to take out a mortgage. With additional financial help from Kate’s sister, Anne, and Harry’s nephew Lloyd, a timber executive, construction was completed in eighteen months, at which time Inland Brewery signed a quitclaim for a dollar and agreed to recoup its loan through payroll deductions.

  Six months later, in July 1913, the Crosbys left the yellow house they had rented for seven years and moved a few blocks to the two-story clapboard house at 508 East Sharp Avenue, one block north of Gonzaga University and St. Aloysius Church. They could see the church steeple through their rear windows. In the front of the house, a concrete walk led to wooden steps and a porch that ran the full width. The house, painted dark brown and overhung with deep eaves, had four bedrooms plus a sleeping porch on the second floor; the amenities included a coal and wood furnace and two bathrooms. The living-and-dining-room area was appointed with a small fireplace trimmed in brown-stained fir, a bookcase, and a window seat. The modest backyard, ringed with climbable locust trees, abutted an alleylike pathway through which the boys could cut to school. Bing carved his mark on a supporting two-by-four in the basement: H.C. ’16.

  On August 25 Kate delivered her seventh child, named George Robert (Bob) after her brother George Robert Harrigan. 29 Bing, at ten, was no longer the youngest son. “Mother told me one thing and I really laugh when I think about it,” Bob recalled. “Bing was the youngest boy, so he wound up with all the old bicycles, the old clothes, the old roller skates, all of that. And when I was born, in the front room of the house up in Spokane, each one of the kids was allowed to come in and see me. When Bing came in, he said to Mother, lying in bed with me in her arms, ‘What is it?’ She said, ‘It’s a boy.’ And he said, ‘Well, it better be,’ and he walked out of the room. And from then on, he took care of me, good care of me. He was a wonderful brother. Outsmarted me all the time.” 30

  Gonzaga University is located on East Boone, named for a descendant of Daniel, so the kids Bing ran with called themselves the Boone Avenue gang. Spokane, a mining community at heart, had never completely cleaned away the stain of Wild West excess, and the earliest tales Bing remembered hearing were of local gambling establishments at which his father took an “occasional flutter at the wheels of chance.” 31 Miners tramped through regularly, and the downtown alleyways harbored all the secrets that make urban life a trial for the righteous. Bing explored them fully. He knew each alley, theater, swimming hole, rat’s nest, playing field, park, and lake. The gang committed petty crimes, landing Bing in the clink more than once; on one occasion Kate, advised of his internment by the arresting officer, told him to keep her son overnight to teach him a lesson. Still, the gang’s crimes were piddling ones: swiping candy and ice cream, drinking, smoking anything they could light, putting up their dukes, and sneaking into movie theaters. The urchins in Bing’s circle produced a priest, lawyer, doctor, judge, boxer, and football Hall of Famer, as well as an entertainer. Bing stayed in touch with some of them his entire life.

  The episode that cemented his stature among his peers — never told the same way twice — involved his challenging one Jim Turner to a fight in defense of his “plump and easygoing” sister Mary Rose. 32 She had been either called “fatty” or caricatured in a picture, which was either distributed to the other kids or drawn on a blackboard. Jimmy Cottrell (later a junior welterweight champ and, with Bing’s help, a Paramount Pictures prop man) was a member of the Logan Avenue gang but was present at the 1914 tussle. He remembered a large crowd of kids circling a parking lot (an alley according to Bing, a playground according to Mary Rose), cheering the contestants. Bing bloodied Turner’s nose (undisputed), earning his sister’s devotion and subdued approval from his parents, especially Kate, who thought him chivalrous.

  Bing was closest to Mary Rose of all his siblings, while Kay bonded with Ted. These lifelong pairings were viewed with irony, because Mary Rose — a candid, funny, exceedingly well liked woman who greatly enjoyed Bing’s reflected glory — was personally much more like Ted. Kay, who was quiet, private, and fiercely independent, was Bing’s double. In later years she never gave an interview, never boasted of her famous brother, never confided in anyone when she was dying of cancer. Of the seven children, only Kay and Bing would never be divorced.

  Yet Mary Rose was his favorite. “Whenever I had problems,” Mary Rose said, “I always went to Bing and he calmed me down and advised me what I should do.” 33 She admired his remarkable memory, apparent from early childhood, and the way he taught himself to do a time step and play drums. His pet name for her was Posie, and he took her ice-skating, sharing his old black skates. “We liked to swim and to skate and none of the others did, particularly,” Mary Rose said. 34 Jim Pool, the last of her three husbands, noted that when Everett was managing Bing and found him intransigent, he would ask Mary Rose to intercede. When Bing noticed Mary Rose and Jim driving an old car, he bought them a new one. “In my book,” Mary Rose said, “he had it made when he was little. I always knew he’d amount to a lot.” 35

  On September 18, 1915, as Bing commenced his final year at Webster, grandfather Dennis Harrigan Jr. passed away at his home in Tacoma, at eighty-three. 36 Bing had been a baby the last time they had seen each other. Six years before, Dennis had been struck by falling timber while inspecting construction of the governor’s mansion, and he never entirely recovered. He was survived by a brother, seven children, fourteen grandchildren (half of them Kate’s), and a widow, Katie, who would become the subject of the opening anecdote in Bing’s 1953 memoir.

  In Bing’s story, his grandmother Katie, who is dying, asks her “Irishman” husband, Dennis, for his hand. “Katie,” he says, “it’s a hand that was never raised against ye.” Eyes dilating, she answers, “And it’s a damn good thing for ye it wasn’t!” Upon delivering that insuperable finish, she expires. 37 It’s a fine tale, paying homage to a spirited Irish woman, and may have some basis in truth (perhaps regarding Bing’s great-grandparents). But Dennis died three years before Katie, and neither ever spent a day in Ireland. Bing’s confusion on this point is instructive. Bing’s family neither visited Dennis when he was ill nor attended his funeral. As an adult, Bing demonstrated a categorical aversion to funerals, memorial services, and hospitals.

  Bing’s skill as a young athlete was as obvious as his musical talent. Too small to make much of an impression in basketball or football, he was game enough to try hard at both as well as boxing and handball. He excelled in baseball and made the Junior Yard Association and varsity teams year after year, first at third base, then center field. He occasionally fantasized about running off to play professionally, and for a season played semipro on a team sponsored by Spokane Ideal Laundry. In his movies he would often incorporate bits of business to display his agility with a ball, though the closest he came to realizing his pro ambitions was buying a piece of the Pittsburgh Pi
rates in 1946.

  Bing was even better at swimming. He learned the hard way. McGoldrick’s lumberyard inhabited a portion of the northern bank of the Spokane River, which was close enough to the Gonzaga complex to disrupt classes with noise and smoke. In the years before the city created a network of public swimming pools, the millpond at the river’s bend, bordered by a sandbar and accessed by logs dumped there for storage, was a deadly lure to neighborhood kids. Some drowned trying to brave the swift rapids beyond the sandbar; many more died trying to walk the log booms to and from the pond. Forbidden from going anywhere near McGoldrick’s, the Boone gang and others could not resist the challenge.

  The boys — Bing and Ted, Frank Corkery and his older brother, Boots, Ralph Foley, Phil Sweeney and his brother, Dan, and half a dozen others — were clustered in the family barn of one of its members when Foley (later a superior court judge and the father of the Speaker of the House Tom Foley) challenged them to join him for a swim in the millpond. They walked south on Standard Street, past Gonzaga and the vacant lots and the railroad tracks, until they reached the narrow sandbar and saw older boys, including Everett, cavorting in the middle of the river. Despite warnings from passersby and the swimmers, they gingerly crossed a cluster of logs, disrobed, and jumped in. During that first adventure, Bing and Ted were painfully sunburned. They managed to hide their discomfort at lunch, but their vocal suffering alerted Kate that night. She insisted, in vain, that Harry whip them, but she soon took pity and applied a reeking goose grease to their inflamed backs.

  As Corkery recalled, Bing was a millpond regular, swimming naked with the others and shocking passengers on the trains that rolled by the log-boom platforms from which they dove. He learned to swim in those currents and revisited them long after the pool at Mission Park opened, six blocks from his home. Jimmy Cottrell swam with Bing at Mission Park but, like him, preferred the excitement of the river: “Bing was a good diver, I admired him. We used to sneak off together to the Spokane River and see who could swim across.” 38 Another admirer of Bing’s watery talents was Mary Sholderer, one of seven girls in a gregarious and generous German family that fed and looked after the Crosby kids. (“We spent about as much time in the Sholderers’ home as we did in our own,” Bing said.) 39 She would not venture to McGoldrick’s but sometimes walked Bing to the Mission pool, carrying Bob in her arms. She watched him dive and swim, and praised his agility. Mary sang soprano at St. Aloysius and, with three of her sisters, grew old in the family house. The beloved spinsters became known for the birthday parties they threw for neighborhood dogs. Bing never forgot Mary’s kindness or failed to visit the Sholderer home when he returned to Spokane.

  From Mary and the other kids, Kate learned how well Bing handled himself in the water. In the summer of 1915 he was hired as towel boy for the Mission Park pool locker room. The following summer Kate coddled him into competing in a citywide swimming contest. On the big day, a couple of weeks after graduating Webster, Bing courted the resentment of his brothers as he lazed about, singing Blanche Ring’s vaudeville hit “I’ve Got Rings on My Fingers,” resting up for the 2:00 P.M. meet. Kate relieved him of chores and prepared his favorite meal, pork chops. To his initial dismay, Kate also insisted on accompanying him to the pool. She did no harm. He won seven medals, including first place in diving and second place in the 100- and 220-yard speed events. When he resumed work at the pool that week, he was advanced from towel boy to lifeguard.

  That same summer Bing added to his finances by caddying. He talked members out of old clubs and played the course on Mondays, becoming obsessed with golf, which replaced swimming as his preferred exercise. During his years in Hollywood, Crosby became an expert golfer, but he had some qualms about keeping a swimming pool and filled in at least one. The presumed reason was his fear that the neighborhood children might have accidents, generating lawsuits. Twenty-three summers after his triumph at the Mission Park pool, Bing attempted to exercise his swimming skills and almost had an accident of his own, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

  Driving back from a golf match with his friend mining heir Harvey Shaeffer, Bing suggested they catch the show at the Billy Rose Aquacade, featuring Eleanor Holm and Bing’s friend from Hollywood Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic swimming champ who became the definitive Tarzan. As Weissmuller introduced the divers, who were climbing up to a fifty-foot board, Bing casually mentioned that he could dive from that height. Shaeffer bet him a hundred dollars he could not. They went backstage. Telling no one but Weissmuller of his plan, Bing borrowed a farcical full-body swimsuit and matching hat and anonymously waited his turn. When it came, he embraced the caper with comic aplomb and was airborne before realizing that his pipe was clamped between his teeth. Fearing it might be driven through his neck, he aborted an intended jackknife in favor of a feet-first plunge. He lost his pipe, incited a furious Billy Rose (who also feared accidents and lawsuits), and collected sixty-five dollars from Shaeffer, who would not accept the plunge as a dive.

  Harry mused, “All of our children were musical, but I must admit I had a soft spot in my heart for Bing, because I liked to hear him sing.” He brought him down to the Spokane Elks Club and had Bing perform for the members. “The piano player of the Elks Quartet became so interested in Bing’s singing that he gave him lessons.” 40 Those lessons, if they took place (Bing never spoke of them), would probably have been gratis. Kate took as focused an interest in his singing as in his swimming. “[She] gave me every break,” Bing said. “In fact, she took me to a teacher. I had about three lessons and she paid for them and she didn’t have the money to spare at the time. I think the lessons cost five dollars a session. He gave me some things to vocalize on, some scales on the piano, and I think I went about three times, but I kept up the vocalizing for a few years — I think it loosened me up. That’s the only formal musical training I ever had.” 41 In his memoir, Bing claims that the lessons petered out when the professor discouraged pop songs and emphasized tone production and breath control. But shortly after Kate’s death, he admitted the trouble was financial: “That fin, you know, every second week, was a little strong for my mother to come up with.” 42 Kay’s piano lessons, however, continued.

  The Crosbys were now facing their worst crunch. On January 1, 1916, Washington went dry. The postboom cleanup, previously directed at gambling and prostitution, claimed one of the city’s major legitimate businesses, three years before the rest of the country had to answer to the Volstead Act. Prohibition and the concurrent sale of the big mines brought an end to Spokane’s growth years. Inland Brewery failed to accept or prepare for the drought, except with layoffs. Harry survived, at a drastically reduced salary, while the company tried to figure out what to do. The city chemist’s confirmation, on January 7, that there was no trace of alcohol in Inland’s “carbonated fizz near-beer” did nothing to stimulate sales. 43 As things got worse, so did Harry’s wages. During some months he may not have been paid at all: for the years 1915 and 1916, he indicated no employment in his entry in the city directory.

  In those dark days, Kate became preoccupied with Bing; just weeks before supervising his triumph at the Mission pool, she dressed her son in finery for his first formal musical performance. At a women’s function, he sang typically sentimental numbers such as “Ben Bolt,” a poem set to a German melody in 1848, 44 and “A Perfect Day,” a 1910 hit by vaudevillian Carrie Jacobs-Bond. For an unsolicited encore, he held a leash in his hand and sang “My Dog Rover,” a ditty he loved. 45 With little provocation, he would sing it in later years on well-lubricated hunting and fishing trips, though he never recorded it. Of the songs he sang that day, the one that seemed to bring out the most in him was a recently published secular hymn, “One Fleeting Hour.” 46 With a broad range of eight whole notes and a forte-grande top-note finish, it was an imposing showpiece for the twelve-year-old. In the 1970s, when television interviewers asked him about his first experience before an audience, Bing unhesitatingly volunteered a few bars:


  When the twilight of eve dims the suns last ray

  And the shades of the night gather fast,

  There’s one fleeting hour that I’ve pray’d would stay,

  Full of joy and of pain that’s passed.

  Yet he never performed it professionally. Bing found his first appearance mortifying. In addition to having to get gussied up, he had to endure a cool reception — nothing like the kind his exuberant uncle George enjoyed.

  Bing had never been hesitant about singing for friends, but performing for church groups was another story, inclining him to play harder with the gang. “My mother dressed me up in some fantastic attire, the knickerbockers and the flowing ties,” Bing said. “That embarrassed me more than the singing, I believe. And of course the fellas I ran around with all thought singing was for girls or for sissies, certainly not for anyone who was going to be an athlete. Because we were mostly, as a group, concerned with rock fights and going down to the millpond and running logs and hooking rides on railroad trains and robbing the bakery wagon and things of that caliber, which were considered a little more adventurous and colorful than standing up in front of a ladies’ sodality and singing ‘One Fleeting Hour.’” 47 He was reprieved for a while when his voice changed, after which he was less shy about asserting himself in style and repertoire.

  5

  GONZAGA

  I was eight years with the Jesuits, four high school, four college. Yeah, pretty well indoctrinated.