Bing Crosby Page 7

  — Bing Crosby (1976) 1

  As a student at Gonzaga High School, part of the small complex of redbrick buildings on Boone Avenue that made up Gonzaga University, Bing could almost roll out of bed and into class. He was often late. The assembled students listened for his unhurried approach: first the slamming of the back door, then a few bars of whistling, then a popular song as he ambled through his backyard to the end of the block, crossed Boone, and strolled into class. After he began haunting weekend vaudeville shows at the Pantages, he made a point of arriving early on Monday mornings to entertain the class with imitations of the comedians and singers who passed through town. Frank Corkery marveled at his ability to memorize routines down to the corniest gags. Far more unusual was Bing’s self-possession — his extraordinary presence of mind.

  Once, before physics class, the gang lured Bing into a storage space, then locked him in just as the instructor arrived. Did he bang on the wall of that black hole and holler for someone to let him out? Hardly. He made no sound at all until the instructor, Francis Prange, uttered his first remarks, at which point Bing’s voice, crooning “The Missouri Waltz,” floated through the room. The teacher stopped, as did the singing. Prange glanced out the window, looked around the room, then resumed. The mysterious if unmistakable voice sang out a second time. Prange quieted, and so did the song. With the next encore, he trailed the voice to its lair, liberated Bing, and dragged him to the principal’s office. 2 It was typical of Bing, a classmate noted, to turn a prank played on him into a more inventive prank of his own. 3

  Gonzaga’s history was well known to the community. 4 In the autumn of 1865, Father Joseph M. Cataldo, a Jesuit missionary from Sicily, entered the Inland Empire, traveling on horseback to Couer d’Alene Mission. Within a year he had built a chapel at Peone Prairie, winning the confidence of the Spokane Indians. Under his leadership, a Catholic orphanage and the Sacred Heart Hospital were constructed. In 1881 he began to build a school for Indians on 320 acres of land just north of the Spokane River, purchased for 936 silver dollars from the Northern Pacific Railroad. Coolie labor made bricks from clay on the riverbank where four decades later the McGoldrick Lumber Company appeared. After six years of delays, Gonzaga College —named for the family of Saint Aloysius, patron saint of youth —opened its doors. But by that time Cataldo’s intentions were undermined by white settlers, who needed schooling for their own children. They insisted that the two-story building with basement and dormitory attic serve them exclusively. Seven boys, ages eleven to seventeen, arrived the first week, greeted by an eight-man faculty —four priests and four scholastics. By 1900 two more buildings had been added to accommodate increased enrollment and a high-school curriculum. A law school followed in 1912, changing Gonzaga’s standing to that of a university.

  Jesuit pedagogy in America focused on educating the middle class, extending the liberalism of the Greeks in the cultivation of grammar, literature, rhetoric, and philosophy, in addition to science. “The right word is a sure sign of good thinking,” the Athenian Isocrates instructed. 5 Writer Michael Harrington, a self-described “pious apostate,” once remarked of his own Jesuit education, “Our knowledge was not free floating; it was always consciously related to ethical and religious values.” 6

  Bing’s devout mother underscored the moral imperatives encouraged during his eight years at Gonzaga. But the stern principles affirmed by her hairbrush were more unforgiving than the liberal inquiries of the Jesuits. Bing drew on both in creating the character of Father O’Malley (Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s), a paradigm of scholastic progressiveness. Privately, however, he was obliged to bargain his way out of a hellfire that was no more metaphorical to him than a golf club. His inclinations toward wildness could be indulged only in the context of an Augustinian postponement. 7 Bing would have understood Flannery O’Connor’s injunction “Good is something under construction.” 8 That part of him remained secret and unknowable, rehearsed only in the Sunday masses he attended without fail all his life.

  In a 1950s radio interview with Father Caffrey, a genial radio priest, Bing recalled in typically breathless style (substituting conjunctions for punctuation) the “wonderful men at Gonzaga in those days.”

  The university was only twenty-five or thirty-five years old then and there was still some of the pioneer staff of the Jesuit order, men around seventy-five or eighty years of age who had come out there in the Indian missions, as Father Cataldo and some of his followers had done, and they were brilliant men, men with great background in the missionary field, and I was much impressed with them, of course, because they had many stories to tell, incidents that happened in the first settlements, working with the Indians, and I was much impressed with their piety. I get a great deal of consolation from my religion, Father, and I think it was firmly embedded in me somehow back there at Gonzaga High and Gonzaga University by the good Fathers. 9

  In his memoir, he credited the priests, whom he invariably describes as powerful and manly, with imparting to him “virility and devoutness, mixed with the habit of facing whatever fate set in my path, squarely, with a cold blue eye.’” 10 The cold blue eye was in his case genetic, the devotion inculcated, the fortitude willed.

  Bing encountered one of the most formidable of those men on his first day, when he and a couple of friends went to register. Father James “Big Jim” Kennelly was a looming but beloved figure, pale-eyed and slope-shouldered, standing six foot three and weighing nearly 300 pounds, garbed in a floor-length black cassock fixed at the waist by a lengthy chain weighted with a ring of keys. As prefect of discipline since 1899, Big Jim was known for flicking his key ring at the bottoms of miscreants with, in Bing’s observation, “the accuracy and speed of a professional fly-caster.” 11 He was no sadist, Bing quickly added, just a conscientious disciplinarian who was always willing to tuck his cassock into his pants and join the boys on the playing field. Bing may have presumed too much on Kennelly’s reputation as a “rah-rah” man and erstwhile star athlete. 12 Asked about his desire to study, Bing allegedly told him, “Yeah, and play some football,” escaping the key ring by inches. 13

  With his nearly photographic memory, Bing found that most subjects came reasonably easily. Leo Lynn, Bing’s factotum (stand-in, driver) for more than forty years, was a fellow student at Gonzaga and admired his sharpness and style. Bing could “rattle off Latin, was terrible at mathematics, good at Greek and history,” he recalled. 14 Despite difficulties in algebra (one semester he wrote an essay called “Why Algebra and Geometry Are Unnecessary in the Modern High School Curriculum”), Bing seemed bound for a conscientious academic career. He received distinctions in history, English, and Christian doctrine and was elected sergeant-at-arms (Frank Corkery was elected vice president) in his first year. With his instantly appreciated sonorous voice, he was chosen to read aloud an original composition to the freshman class. He faced thirty boys in uniform white blouses without a trace of nerves. Come spring, he was one of the fifty students competing in the annual high-school elocution assembly, and one of only fourteen chosen for “public exhibition.” He read “Old Watermelon Time.”

  At Gonzaga’s neighboring church, St. Aloysius, Bing put his Latin to use as an altar boy, attending service daily at 6:30 in the morning every third week throughout his four years of high school. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum (To God who gives joy to my youth) was forever imprinted in his memory. “I served mass all over Spokane when I was up there,” he said. He served in later years as well, at least twice on transatlantic liners, assisting shipboard priests. “Of course,” he observed of those experiences, “I had to use the book. I couldn’t remember all the responses, but I guess I got by all right.” 15

  Bing Crosby is the only major singer in American popular music to enjoy the virtues of a classical education. It grounded his values and expectations, reinforcing his confidence and buffering him from his own ambition. As faithful as he was to show business, his demeanor was marked by a serenity that
suggested an appealing indifference. He had something going for him that could not be touched by Hollywood envy and mendacity. He acted in the early years of his career as if he didn’t give a damn, displaying an irresponsibility that would have ensured a less talented man’s failure, and he learned to turn that knowing calm into a selling point. Other performers worked on the surface, but Bing kept as much in reserve as he revealed. He was as cool in life as he was in song or onscreen. He was the kind of man who, notified by phone the day after New Year’s 1943 that his family was safe but his home had burned to cinders, deadpanned, “Were they able to save my tux?” The Jesuits trained him to weigh the rewards of this world versus those of the next and to keep his own counsel. His brother Bob once said, “As an actor he played Bing Crosby, ‘cause he went to Jesuit school all his life. He knew the Jebbies pretty well.” 16

  Bing himself was willing to give them much of the credit. Classes in elocution, in which he excelled, taught him not only to enunciate a lyric but to analyze its meaning. At Gonzaga High, education was idealized in the phrase eloquentia perfecta (perfect eloquence). Students coached in literature were expected to attain rhetorical mastery as well. However casual a student Bing may have been — however much an underachiever, in the opinion of some teachers — he maintained better than average grades until his last year of pre-law, sustaining a consistent B/B+ average and taking several honors. “We had a lot of experience in public speaking and debating societies, standing on your feet and talking, and doing plays,” he emphasized, “and if I have ability as an actor, that’s where I got it.” 17

  The Crosbys placed great stock in education, less in graduation. Harry Lowe dropped out of school, and so would most of his sons. (Catherine and Mary Rose attended Holy Names Academy, the neighboring convent school, and North Central High, but like most women in working-class families were not expected to attend college.) Yet Kate and Harry labored hard to keep the boys in school as long as possible. When Everett left to take a job, Kate’s disappointment was relieved only by the idea that his salary would help the younger boys graduate.

  Larry, the oldest, did graduate. He described the family’s “common traits” as “natural conservatism, civic and patriotic interests, and devotion to education and learning, even at a time in our early history when such attainments were not common.” 18 He proceeded to tally history’s most learned Crosbys, without explaining how or if they figured in the direct family line: surgeons, jurists, scholars, writers, reformers, soldiers, and politicians, among them William George Crosby, a legislator in Maine after the Civil War; Howard Crosby, a reformer, clergyman, and writer, and his son Ernest, a prolific if marginal poet; and Cornelia Thurza Crosby, a trout fisherwoman called Fly Rod Crosby, after she outraged an assembly of sportsmen at Madison Square Garden by showing up in a green skirt “seven inches above the floor.” 19 Most significant from a musical angle was Frances (Fanny) Jane Crosby, the blind poet and hymn writer, who died in New York City in 1915 at ninety-five, credited with 8,000 hymns, including “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “There’s Music in the Air,” and a lyric to “Dixie” with which she attempted to turn that anthem into a Northern rallying cry, called “On! Ye Patriots to the Battle.”

  On Good Friday 1917 President Wilson read his proclamation of war, and Gonzaga, like most campuses, hummed with patriotic commotion. The exodus of young men began in early June. Larry and Everett, gone from school by then, were instantly caught up in the fever. Larry quit his job as a clerk for New York Life Insurance and applied to officers’ training camp at the Presidio, leaving straightaway for San Francisco. Everett, who had left his job as assistant auditor at the Davenport Hotel to pursue greener prospects in Montana, wrote home that he had enlisted in the field artillery. (“I never rode a horse before in my life but I tried not to let the officers know it.”) 20 Ted, a year below draft age, went to college, where he spent much of his time writing spy stories set in shady European capitals.

  The older boys were away more than two years. Larry served as second lieutenant and commanded the Forty-fourth Company of the depot brigade at Camp Funston, Kansas; after the armistice, he was made camp insurance officer. Ev, a sergeant in the American Expeditionary Forces, was sent from Douglas, Arizona (where he boasted that he won a football game for the Eleventh Division Field Artillery), to St. Aignan. After he was decommissioned, he savored Gay Paree for two years, working part of the time as an American guide, living the high life, mastering French. Kate had hoped the conquering heroes would help pay for the younger boys’ schooling and shared her hope that either Ted or Bing would join the priesthood, a future Bing claimed to have contemplated.

  An event that occurred when he was a teenager of fourteen made it clear that Bing was probably not destined for the clergy. He had taken a summer job as a property boy at Spokane’s prize theater, the Auditorium, and saw some of the finest acts and revues of the day. 21 On the evenings of June 19 and 20, Bing watched backstage as Al Jolson played his standard character, Gus, in Robinson Crusoe Jr. It was a role he had created a few years earlier: the canny black servant — in this farce, a chauffeur doubling as Friday — who always saves the day. A whirlwind comedian, Jolson raced around the stage ad-libbing lines and business, even song lyrics. During the show’s fifteen-month tour, he was billed for the first time as “the World’s Greatest Entertainer.”

  Bing was spellbound by the electrifying blackface performer. Jolson brought the house down with his spoof of Hawaiian songs “Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula” and the lunatic “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?” (cowritten by the same team that wrote Bing’s early signature song ten years later, “In a Little Spanish Town”). 22 Bing and his friends knew and admired Jolson’s recordings, but neither records nor all the live vaudeville he soaked up on weekend evenings prepared him for the man’s galvanizing energy. “I hung on every word and watched every move he made,” he recalled. “To me, he was the greatest entertainer who ever lived.” 23 At fourteen, Bing began to imagine himself before the footlights; he kept those dreams to himself.

  Harry’s fortunes had wavered uncertainly for two years, but at long last Inland Brewery’s stockholders “concluded to accept present conditions as to prohibition” and changed the corporate name to Inland Products Company. 24 They authorized the expenditure of $175,000 to erect a modern cold-storage warehouse and convert the brewery into a vinegar factory. Reincorporated in 1917, the firm elected four officers: the three original partners and H. L. Crosby, secretary, whose duties also included selling merchandise from a new retail shop that stocked pickles, sugared cider, ice, candy, ketchup, ice cream, soda water, and near beer. 25 It promoted itself as the “Home of 22 Varieties.” Pickles assumed particular prominence after Inland contracted with a distributor that supplied New York’s Lower East Side Orthodox Jewish community. A Spokane rabbi regularly visited the plant to certify its pickles as kosher.

  Harry would coast reasonably well until 1923, when senior partner Charles Theis appointed his son secretary and laid off Harry, bringing him back as shipping clerk. A man whose father worked as foreman of the plant recalled that as a boy he and his friends visited the shop to buy soda and candy. Mr. Crosby would come out of the back office and wait on them: “A very pleasant fellow, very pleasant. Medium build and, well, he wasn’t a handsome guy, but he was a nice-looking fellow. He had a very good personality and everybody liked him.” 26

  Harry’s own boys were ambivalent; they knew very well who controlled the Crosby house. “She was a matriarch,” Bob said of Kate, adding, “we were shanty Irish,” to explain the tradition. 27 Kate was strict and hard, though not the terror she became in later years, when Bing’s office workers doused their cigarettes and smoothed their skirts because they heard she was in the building. When Bing was young, Kate was the powerful center of his life. Her will ultimately helped drive him from Spokane, but he left with an armor of independence and raw nerve. Kate alone could always threaten his equilibrium. Until she died, her
sudden appearance in a room would prompt him to put aside his drink and snuff his cigarette. Peggy Lee recalled a party at the Crosbys’ when she and Bing were conversing near the piano. As Mrs. Crosby walked in, Bing maneuvered his glass behind some picture frames. 28

  Asked, as he often was, if he attributed his success to any particular factor, Bing usually answered: “I think my mother’s prayers. She’s always been a firm believer in the efficacy of prayer and since I was a little boy, she prayed for all of us daily, and had masses said for us and rosaries, and the nuns up in our parish, the Poor Clares, they’re a cloistered order — they don’t ever get out of the monastery — she would bring them meals and take their laundry out and do all kinds of things, and they always prayed for me and for the family, for our health and our well-being, both spiritual and physical…. If I’ve been lucky, and I certainly have been inordinately lucky, why I think you have to attribute it to the efficacy of prayer.” 29 When Bing was not honoring his mother’s probity, he would issue credit for his success to producers, managers, and associates, claiming for himself only the good sense to take their advice. If Kate had sent him on his way with a ready supply of confidence, she also instilled in him the old Irish commandment to keep his head down.

  Harry’s finances intensified the need for his kids to earn money on their own. “Dependability was a necessity in our house with seven youngsters around and a happy life only possible if everyone followed an established pattern of family routine,” Kate later explained. “The older ones,” she continued, “had to help with the younger ones and they had to try not to be an expense on the family purse. When their clothes and their parties became an item, they had to seek methods of earning their way a little to help out.” Bing had no trouble with this. Kate once overheard him tell a friend, “I like a jingle in my pocket that’s my very own.” 30