Bing Crosby Read online

  Bing probably worked as many jobs as the rest of the Crosby children combined — in addition to his household chores, which included, at various times, keeping the woodbox full, scrubbing floors, mowing the lawn, and raising chickens in the yard. He was always on the go — early to bed and early to rise, making the most of every waking moment. He was available to milk cows, run errands, and mow lawns. In harvesting season he raced out with other kids to “thin” the apple orchards. Not that he needed authorization to harvest. His friend Benny Ruehl remembered Bing and the other boys stealing cherries from trees in his front yard. “My mother squirted the boys with a garden hose to get them out of the trees.” 31 Ruehl also recalled the time one boy successfully dared Bing to bellyflop into a mud puddle, while Harry stood by and laughed. Harry could not help but admire Bing’s resourcefulness. His high-school jobs during summer and holidays included — in addition to lifeguard and caddy —postal worker, boxing usher, grocery-truck driver, woodchopper at a resort, and topographer at a lumber camp.

  And he still came up short. Delbert Stickney, whose family lived down the street, often went to the movies with Bing. Delbert’s mother worked in a department store downtown, and the boys regularly stopped by her counter to bum change for the show. When he visited the Stickney home, Bing would sit in the parlor, singing and pecking a song on the piano with one finger while cradling Delbert’s baby niece Shirley on his lap. In 1948 Shirley’s daughter suffered an attack of polio and could not afford treatments. Hearing that Bing was stopping in Spokane, Mrs. Stickney went to his hotel and asked for a loan. “No, I won’t loan it to you,” he told her, “but I’ll give it to you. All the quarters Delbert and I borrowed from you including interest must be close to that amount.” 32

  For a boy characterized as lackadaisical, Bing had a peculiar affinity for early-morning jobs he could keep throughout the school year. As delivery boy for the Spokesman-Review, he rose at four to collect the papers. His whistling and singing carried far in the quiet Spokane mornings as he pedaled his bike from house to house. Occasionally a neighbor raised a window and warned him to keep it down. In 1938 he wrote Charles Devlin of the paper’s promotional department, “I hope all my boys may start as carriers. I want them to be workers.” 33 All his brothers had routes, he noted, and the girls filled in when the boys were sick. “Of the bunch, I probably developed the least desire for labor… but the whistling experience came in mighty handy.” 34

  No amount of work could compromise Bing’s belief that he was by nature lazy. If indolence was part of the professional Crosby charm, it figured privately as a source of penitence. As Seneca wrote and Bing learned to recite in Latin, “Nothing is so certain as that the evils of idleness can be shaken off by hard work.” The habit of rising early came naturally to him. He roused himself on cold winter mornings when it was dark and warmed his hands over an oil drum, waiting for the papers. After delivering them, he had breakfast at home, served mass (if it was the third week of the month), and attended school. One of Kate’s friends told Bing about an open position for morning janitor at the Everyman’s Club on Front Avenue, a flophouse for transient miners and loggers in the heart of skid row. Bing applied for the job and was hired. For a buck a day that winter, he layered himself in wool clothing and after delivering his papers took a streetcar across the river into downtown Spokane, arriving at five. For the next hour, he tidied the facility, maneuvering around the drunks and layabouts, learning about canned heat (which, liquefied into its alcoholic content, caused blindness and madness) and powdered tobacco and other comforts of the lower depths. He was back home for breakfast by seven, except on days he had 6:30 mass.

  Kate proudly described him as “prompt, methodical, sticks to his plans and sticks to his word.” 35 She bristled at the notion, promulgated chiefly by Bing himself, that he was idle. “My children were brought up to do for themselves and from the oldest to the youngest they still do. Anyone who works with Bing, for instance, knows he rarely sends or asks for things. He just quietly goes and gets it for himself.” 36 Later, in Hollywood, he was known for his entourage of one, Gonzaga classmate Leo Lynn. A butler whom Bing hired in his most baronial years — at the insistence of his second wife — mistakenly assumed Crosby didn’t like him, as he wasn’t permitted to pack or carry his employer’s suitcase or open his car door or fuss over him at all. 37

  “He had a vocabulary like a senator’s,” Bing’s father once said, “and we used to call him Travis McGutney.” 38 His way with words, not just his singing and whistling, helped define Bing’s personality for his friends. He rolled large words on his tongue, trilled rs, fiddled with malapropisms and spoonerisms, and mimicked the lower, upper, and outcast classes, exemplified in minstrel badinage or highfalutin rhetoric. This talent gave him distinction within his gang. Interviewed in the 1940s, childhood friends and neighbors said they thought him more likely to become a comedian than a singer. One pal said he hardly recognized the Bing he knew in the movies until he began making the Road pictures with Bob Hope. All that easy banter with Hope, the double takes and primed reactions, the fast wit and easy superiority — that was the way he was in school. His romantic pictures of the 1930s, on the other hand, weren’t Bing at all, a friend said; he had never showed that much interest in girls.

  The only early crush he spoke of was inspired by one Gladys Lemmon, who survived in the Crosby mythology less for her curly-haired charms than her pun-inspiring name. Upon hearing that Bing carried her books and took her sledding, Larry taunted him at the dinner table as a lemon-squeezer, prompting Bing to hurl a slice of buttered bread that in later accounts metamorphosed into a leg of lamb. The courtship allegedly ended when Bing was forced to wear a starched priestlike collar that made his neck chafe to Gladys’s birthday party. It was not his only social faux pas. Margaret Nixon would not invite him to her birthdays because he once stole the party ice cream from her back porch. He was that kind of boy, she said. And Vera Lemley complained that after she broke a date with him, Bing would not talk to her for two years.

  If his glib lingo failed to serve Bing as a gallant, it did enhance his standing at Gonzaga High. In his sophomore year he was cited as Next in Merit in elocution (Frank Corkery, who put no less faith in language, won the gold medal) and took first honors in English. Bing’s popularity and sportsmanship were affirmed early in the semester: he was elected class consultor and captained the victorious Dreadnoughts in the Junior Yard Association Midget Football League. He also made the JYA baseball team. Posing in his striped red-and-white uniform, he was small, chubby, beaming. Those endeavors proved less meaningful than his admission to the Junior Debating Society, which increased his presence in public-speaking events, though he proved better at elocution than debate. The university magazine, Gonzaga, reviewed a recital of Poe’s “The Bells” by Bing, Corkery, and two others as “striking and novel,” the high point of a contest in public speaking. 39 Bing recited “Romancin’” to a packed house at St. Aloysius Hall and took the adverse position in a debate about limiting the American presidency to a single term of six years.

  In 1919, through the efforts of Father Kennelly, football was restored as a major activity at Gonzaga. Its triumphant team produced two players inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. One was Ray Flaherty (“big and powerful — watch out for Flaherty,” Gonzaga prophesied), with whom Bing remained friendly all his life. Flaherty led the NFL in pass receptions in 1932, helped the New York Giants to the NFL championship in 1934, and retired as coach with the highest winning percentage (.735) in the annals of the Washington Redskins. Ray and Bing were on the Midget team together, and Ray admired his moxie, though he did not think much of him as a footballer. 40 Still, Bing’s fortitude was noted after he trimmed down to 135 pounds and learned to handle himself adequately as center. Of a JYA game against Hillyard High (a tie: 19-19), Gonzaga reported, “B. Crosby was a tower of strength on defense.” 41

  Flaherty conceded that Bing was “pretty good” at baseball. “We playe
d on the Ideal Laundry team in the commercial or business league. We’d play at Mission Park, five blocks up the street from Gonzaga. Oh, we were best of friends, used to chum around all the time, wrestled, played handball, though he didn’t play too much handball. Bing was more into entertainment in the evening. He was always a happy kid and was always singing a song. Even though he was a little kid, he was singing. He just was full of music and he was a great whistler. He could really whistle. They used to have these smokers where they’d have kids that liked to box and they’d get a pretty good student body and some outsiders. Bing used to sing at those. He didn’t box, I don’t think, but he sang and that brought some people in, too. Hell, he could sing like nobody else, sing and whistle. He had a hell of a whistle.” 42

  In addition to winning reelection as class consultor in his junior year, Bing was voted Junior Yard Association secretary-treasurer following “a stormy session and a bit of political logrolling.” 43 Bing racked up distinctions in English, history, elocution, theology, Latin, and civics and prevailed in reading competitions, scoring coups with “The Dukite Snake” and Macauley’s poem of Horatius at the Bridge. “I took those eloquent lines in my teeth and shook them as a terrier shakes a bone,” he wrote. 44 Bing, Corkery, and Flaherty enlisted together as charter members of Gonzaga’s new glee club. In the club’s annual photograph, Bing sports a high pompadour and a roomy jacket. For their first grand concert in St. Aloysius Hall, Bing did not participate in musical numbers but read three selections during intermission.

  He fared less well in debate; as part of a two-man team that lost two decisions, he argued against abolishing immigration and forcing Woodrow Wilson’s resignation due to illness. Bing, who always took the liberal side, was demoted to an alternate in his senior year. His role in the public debate that year (concerning the League of Nations) was to deliver a recitation at intermission. 45 He had reason to regard his education as Augustine did his own: “Their one aim was that I should learn how to make a good speech and become an orator capable of swaying his audience,” the Bishop of Hippo wrote. 46

  Bing looked back with mocking amusement at the rival clubs organized by the most avid speakers and debaters. He founded the Bolsheviks in loyal opposition to the Dirty Six, who commandeered perks such as patrolling varsity sporting events. The “rival tongs,” as Bing called them, indulged in free-for-all political debate. 47 Inevitably, a priest — Father O’Brien, a Brit — reproached Bing’s clique for embracing a name associated with godlessness. “Apparently his devoutness and his English sense of humor had him confused, for he said we’d be ‘cleansed’ if we stopped using the name,” Bing wrote. 48 Bing also joined the Derby Club, an offshoot of the Bolsheviks, which consisted of six or eight “blades” who sported derbies in class.

  Recitation led to other theatrical projects. Gonzaga looked upon theater not merely as a high-school drama-club option but as an undertaking essential to a model Jesuit education. Writing in the university yearbook, instructor William DePuis traced “love of the dramatic” to a pagan worship of Bacchus, which the church adapted to its own ends: “The Mystery and Miracle play taught the sacred story of Christ and the saints. The religious idea yielded gradually to the popular desire for amusement, and the holy day became the holiday.” 49 That notion would be employed as a motif in Bing’s Father O’Malley films.

  Bing enjoyed two genuine theatrical triumphs in his senior year, yet the production that became fixed in Crosby lore was a junior English class presentation of Julius Caesar — a prize example of hapless mythmaking. In the February 1919 performance, promoted in the Spokane Daily Chronicle with a photo and cast listing, Bing played Second Citizen. His friend Ed “Pinky” Gowanlock played Caesar. According to witnesses interviewed three decades later, the most memorable moment followed Caesar’s death, as the rolled-up curtain sprang from its hinges and nearly flattened Pinky. Over time, however, Bing became the center of everyone’s memories. According to Ted and Larry, he played Marc Antony and dodged the curtain; according to Everett, he played Caesar and dodged the curtain. According to Bing, in 1946, he played a fallen soldier who dodged the curtain and was rewarded with howls of laughter, for which he took many bows. In 1976 he said that he played a fallen soldier who calmly walked off after the curtain fell. If one accepts Pinky’s account, he might well have invoked Plautus’s lament Ut saepe summa ingenia in occulto latent (How often the greatest talents are shrouded in obscurity). Bing did remark in 1957, when he presented the school with a new library, “In show business, we like to take our bows, even when we can steal them.” 50

  Forgotten entirely or at least unmentioned was the Antony Bing played ten months later at the annual Gonzaga Night revelry that preceded the December break. Though it surely stretched Gonzaga’s notion of creditable theater, Bing, Corkery, and a few friends offered a minstrel burlesque of Shakespeare, depicting Caesar as a “dark-skinned bone artist.” 51 Their performance, a Bolshevik send-up of the Dirty Sixers who appeared in Pinky’s version, marked Bing’s second venture into burnt cork. Blackface was then too much a show-business convention to elicit accusations of racism. A year earlier the Spokane County Council of Defense put the First Amendment on hold to pass a resolution banning The Birth of a Nation; the same community had no qualms concerning traveling minstrel troupes and would have felt cheated had Al Jolson shown up at the Auditorium in paleface.

  In the spring the drama and glee clubs presented an Irish playlet, The Curate of Kilronan, at St. Aloysius, a production paced with several Irish songs. Once again Bing did not sing, but his acting earned him a notice in the school magazine: he and another student had “used well their experience on the stage and acquitted themselves in fine style as true friends of the unfortunate curate.” 52 Bing and his brother Ted were feted afterward at a cast banquet at the Spokane Hotel.

  While Bing was charming his way through school, exhibiting less ambition than verve, displaying varied talents that never quite came into focus, Ted nursed his desire to write and worked at it like a professional. Ted was one of Gonzaga’s most enterprising and prolific contributors, and in his senior year he edited the alumni section. During the summer he interned at the Spokane Evening Chronicle, where Larry worked after the war. But everything seemed to fall into Bing’s lap, not least the devotion of their mother and a stable of friends. An occasional truant, Bing was all too familiar with the Jug, a room where unruly students atoned by memorizing the Latin of Virgil, Ovid, Caesar — backward, if the offense was serious. 53 Ted, on the other hand, was as steady as they come. Yet even the priests preferred Bing, perhaps because they were gung-ho on sports, and Ted was the only Crosby boy who ducked athletics. Bing sparkled and Ted plodded.

  Ted was taller than Bing, his coloring similar — blue eyes, a darker shade of brown hair. A keen reader, he kept to himself, inventing a fantasy life and exploring it in a profusion of short stories, poems, and essays. Bing ended up living much of what Ted imagined. Ted would raise a family in Spokane, where for most of his life he worked at the Washington Water Power Company. In his one book, The Story of Bing Crosby, published in 1946, he depicts himself in childhood as a would-be inventor, disowning entirely the years he put into his writing. Yet unlike that frivolous and highly fictionalized account, some of his early stories suggest a darker view of his rivalry with Bing.

  Ted’s “When Black Is White,” for example, published in Gonzaga a couple of months before Bing graduated from high school, establishes as its villain Dr. Howard Croye, “a gifted speaker,” very popular, and “deeply interested in church work.” “Aristocratic in habits and faultless in attire,” he charms a millionaire mining magnate into financing his construction of a sanatorium. Howard absconds with the money, eventually returning to the sanatorium to die an agonizing death. In contrast, the dependable center of the story is a journalist, Jim (Ted’s middle name was John), who uncovers the deception and brings salvation to the children of Howard and the philanthropist he destroyed. 54

  The mon
th Bing graduated, Gonzaga published his sole offering, a poem in celebration of wealth, renown, exotic climes, and dreamy languor. It stood out in stark contrast to Ted’s odes to fallen heroes, God, Gonzaga, duty, Crosby seafarers, Lincoln, the Northwest and to those of every other Gonzaga poet, who invariably evoked patriotism, mother, and God.

  A King.

  While lying on my couch one night

  I dreamed a dream of wondrous light.

  I thought I was an ancient king

  Of the Mystic East — I heard them sing

  My praises high in accents grand,

  While cymbals echoed loud — and

  As I sat in robes of white

  With vassals kneeling left and right,

  Strong, dusky slaves from Hindustan

  Alighting from the caravan

  Upon their heads and in their arms

  Bore spice and all the Orient’s charms,

  While flowed the music soft and sweet

  They piled them high about my feet.

  But I was snatched from this away In rudeness by the dawn of day.

  — Harry L. Crosby, H.S. ’20 55

  Some believe that only those who admit to themselves that they crave wealth and prestige can obtain them. Only in “A King,” a thin, dashed-off indulgence consigned to a volume of juvenilia, did Bing ever come close to acknowledging his ambitions, at least in public. All his life — on radio, in films, press releases, magazines, and interviews — Bing portrayed himself and was portrayed by others as an unambitious man to whom splendid things happened, deservedly, without his ever really chasing fortune. Bing’s ambivalence about worldly success was made manifest in the early stages of his career, when he did everything possible to sabotage himself. It was as if success were acceptable only as a gift, unexpected and unsought. Despite his hard work and desperate longing, he never publicly allowed that he merited his special fate.