Bing Crosby Page 9

  Fifty-two students received diplomas from Gonzaga on June 9, 1920, the largest graduating class that the high school had ever produced. Students had a choice of pursuing a diploma in a general or classical course, and Bing received his in the latter. Nearly a month before, the class and faculty had celebrated with a picnic and sporting events at Liberty Lake, eighteen miles east, where the graduates rented canoes and swam in the recently opened pool. On June 7 the Spokane Daily Chronicle announced the list of those who would speak at graduation, among them two representatives of the student body, Frank Corkery and Bing. In an accompanying photograph, Bing sports a necktie (as do the others) but looks drowsy and exhibits not a trace of the slight smiles the others share.

  Graduation exercises took place on a Wednesday afternoon in the gym, and after the Gonzaga orchestra played the overture, “Columbia,” Harry L. Crosby was introduced as the first speaker. His speech was “The Purpose of Education,” a text that has not survived. Corkery delivered the valedictory. Bing was not awarded class honors, so his prominent role in the ceremony must be construed as an acknowledgment of his elocutionary and speech-making skills. Among other speakers was the Reverend Charles E. Carroll, S.J., prefect of studies, who became dean of the faculty in 1922 and overseer of the Bing Crosby Library in 1957.

  Bing had slimmed down in the past year — the chubby, grinning boy of his freshman pictures was now lanky and serious, his face longer and leaner, his voice deeper and more controlled. But he was a year younger than his classmates and looked it. A downtown dance hall refused him admission one evening, sending him away in humiliation. For all his singing, Bing had not yet fixed his star on music, though a friend later recalled his listening to a Jolson record and marveling aloud that by singing a couple of songs Al earned enough money to buy a car.

  His taste in music began to lean toward jazz, an almost unavoidable partiality given the raging popularity in 1917 of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a second-rate ensemble that had the distinction of making the earliest jazz records. A white band from New Orleans, the ODJB created a sensation in New York with novel, noisy, and irreverent music, including instrumental barnyard imitations on “Livery Stable Blues.” Its fans included black songwriter Shelton Brooks, whose “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” was the ODJB’s first record. (Columbia Records, offended by the loud, poorly engineered performance, shelved it until Victor picked up the ball and produced a series of ODJB hits.)

  By 1923 many superior black bands were recording and performing for mixed northern audiences, diminishing the ODJB’s status to that of a jazz popularizer. But in the interim, countless bands throughout the country followed the ODJB’s lead, blending the rudiments of ragtime, jazz, blues, marches, vaudeville, dance music, and popular songs, and young people devoured their recordings.

  Among the performers Bing and his friends recalled listening to —in addition to Jolson, John McCormack, and other singers — were Six Brown Brothers, a saxophone choir (soprano on the high end, bass on the bottom) popular on the vaudeville circuit and through such buoyant recordings as “That Moaning Saxophone Rag” and its own version of “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” as well as adaptations of arias, and Art Hickman, the pioneering San Francisco-based bandleader who composed the standard “Rose Room” and codified big band or dance band instrumentation — in effect, setting the stage for Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. They listened to Hawaiian bands with steel guitars and comedy records, like Joe Hayman’s million-selling “Cohen on the Telephone,” and everything else that came through town. Every new record was a mystery until it was played.

  In the summer of 1920, with the rigors of Gonzaga University approaching, Bing felt a need to escape Spokane. He was bored with excursions to Newman and Liberty Lakes, where small bands played at dances; he had had enough caddying and swimming for a while. He wanted to see something of the world and break loose even for a short time from the house on East Sharp. After the war Larry returned home, teaching high school while working nights and summers at the newspaper. Everett rushed through Spokane like a storm, traveling on to Portland, where he claimed to be clerking in a hotel.

  Bing and his friend Paul Teters resolved to leave town for a couple of months. A want ad in the paper alerted them to a job for two men to work on an alfalfa farm in Cheney, Washington, half an hour away by train, for two bucks a day and board. After securing permission from their parents, they left in the morning and presented themselves for work. The alfalfa farmer was underwhelmed — they were young and inexperienced — and he offered them a dollar each. They grudgingly accepted.

  Two decades later Bing bought an 8,700-acre cattle ranch in Elko, Nevada, and insisted that his sons do haying and other exhausting tasks along with the paid cowhands. Gary, the eldest, bridled at the drudgery and years later smiled knowingly upon learning that his father had been no more enamored of farming than Gary had been of ranching. After two weeks of milking cows and putting up alfalfa for forage, Bing and Paul decided to quit. Returning home was out of the question. Luckily, though, Everett Crosby was in Portland, 400 miles west, and he would certainly put them up and maybe find them work. The boys hiked to a water tower where the evening freight train stopped to replenish, and under cover of darkness stole a ride.

  They were dusty and rank by the time they pulled into Portland and rushed to the hotel where Everett clerked, only to find out that he did not work there. They were asked to remove their scruffy selves from the lobby. Confused but emboldened, the boys turned their sights on Los Angeles, hopping a southbound Shasta Limited. They got as far as Roseburg, where a railroad bull collared them and put them in a cattle car heading back to Portland. This time they ran into Everett on the street, toting two wicker suitcases full of bootleg hooch. He told them to meet him later at the Shaw Hotel and gave them a dollar for a movie. After the picture show, the hungry boys looked down the street and saw a sign advertising a second-story Chinese restaurant. They split a dish of chop suey and, after Bing diverted the owner by shoving menus off the front counter, raced down the stairs without paying. An alert policeman tracked them to Everett’s room and arrested them. Everett paid the lunch bill, and they were released with the magistrate’s warning to leave town.

  Bing wrote to Kate and told her not to worry, knowing she would worry less about yet another of his minor scrapes than the possibility that he might not want to return to school in September. Kate’s brother George met the boys in Portland and took them to the West-dale mills, where they boarded a logging train to a camp Bing’s cousin Lloyd operated for Weyerhaeuser Lumber. Jobs were offered: Paul chose to return home while Bing signed on as a topographer scouting trails. Somehow he gashed his knee with an axe — in one retelling, he said he gashed both knees in consecutive accidents. He clearly wanted out of that forest, even in memory. Gonzaga University now promised relief, like mass after a morning at the Everyman’s Club.

  6

  MR. INTERLOCUTOR

  No doubt the appeal of minstrelsy came from these draughts upon a common reminiscence, stirring some essential wish or remembrance.

  — Constance Rourke, American Humor (1931) 1

  Although Bing quickly decided against becoming a priest, he did reach a compromise that appeased Kate. Lawyering was reasonably honorable and solid and would make use of his gifts for elocution and debate. Kate could also console herself with the fact that law school would keep him at home for another couple of years. Frank Corkery, who served mass with Bing, did not think that his friend gave much thought to the priesthood — not this independent young man who dreamed of sultanic riches while nosing around in skid-row muck, who had lately managed to turn what promised to be a brief stint on a nearby farm into a flight to the coast, an aborted trip south, and a narrow escape from what he liked to quaintly refer to as durance vile.

  Gonzaga University was not, however, a mere continuance of high school. Though the student body numbered no more than 300, many of them neighborhood boys, the university harbored its own prejudi
ces, directed against day students like Bing, who were not permitted to partake of dormitory activities. Bing and the other townies were required to leave campus by half past four, except for the one evening per week when the debating society met. The “boarders,” students from outside Spokane, considered Bing’s crowd mere provincials and demanded they prove themselves. But Bing never had any trouble making friends. He was “a cheerful and appealing guy,” in Ray Flaherty’s recollection, “a knowledgeable, very entertaining person to be around.” 2 Still, the boarders did not make it easy for him. Though he ultimately disarmed them with his voice, at first he was reluctant to sing formally and switched his musical inclinations to the drums. “I didn’t have to learn a feeling for music and for rhythm,” Bing observed. “I was born with that.”

  Had the Crosbys not lived in the vicinity, they could not have afforded Bing’s schooling. Boarders paid $265.50 a semester. Day students paid only $80.50 (thirty dollars more than high school), payable on registration day. 3 When he took up drums in the spring of his freshman year, Bing was obliged to pay an additional $7.50 for use of the instrument. When in his junior year he enrolled in the combined college and law course, which conferred bachelor’s and law degrees in six years, his tuition per semester increased another seventy-five dollars. Sensitive to his parents’ investment in his education, Bing applied himself for the first two years, fulfilling requirements in English, Latin, modern languages (Spanish and French), public speaking, mathematics, and religion. “A man of fair capacity who has conscientiously followed this curriculum,” pledged the Gonzaga Register of 1920, “will thus be in touch and sympathy with progress in every field of intellectual activity.” 4

  Bing was as diligent as one could be about wearing the green beanie required of freshmen. “There is one thing that beats snipe shootin’ and that is hunting Freshmen without green caps,” the Register contended. 5 He matriculated as a member of the largest freshman class so far, at an exciting time in the school’s history. That year Gonzaga hired the nationally known coach and former Notre Dame quarterback Gus Dorais. 6 Thanks to Dorais, whose tenure exactly paralleled Bing’s (Dorais was long regarded as second only to Bing in bringing recognition to the school), the next four years proved to be the university’s golden age of football. Bing was too small to play on the invincible football and basketball teams, but he made his enthusiasm known and was elected to the new advisory board on athletics as one of two assistant yell leaders. In his sophomore year he and thirty-four other students tried out for two baseball teams. Bing made the cut, and Dorais assigned him third base. 7

  All school sports were supervised by the advisory board, controlled by its moderator, Curtis J. Sharp, S.J., a robust personality and erstwhile amateur boxer who had recently arrived at Gonzaga from Anaconda, Montana. He was to Bing an exemplary figure, combining harsh discipline with amiable generosity. Armed with a leather strap that he applied to the backsides of younger students and the hands of older ones, Sharp nonetheless inspired a fervent devotion, perhaps too much so. As a parent, Bing would obtain “a big leather belt — similar to the one I’d backed up to at Gonzaga in the hand of Father Sharp.” 8 Bing acquired more than a trust in corporal punishment from Sharp. He admired his poise, his man’s-man rectitude, and regular-Joe disposition. Bing often told how in 1937, when he brought his radio show to Gonzaga for a homecoming game and received an honorary degree, he slipped into the locker room to swig the remainder of a pint. In burst Father Sharp. Bing stashed the bottle — “an instinctive return to the habits of my student years.” 9 As they small-talked their way out the door, Sharp suddenly stepped back to where Bing had been sitting and retrieved the hidden flask. He emptied it with a gulp and observed, “It wouldn’t be right to let a soldier die without a priest.” 10 It was Sharp on whom Bing modeled Father O’Malley in Going My Way.

  Two other instructors Bing had reason to recall with more than usual regard were Father Edward Shipsey and James Gilmore. Shipsey, the chairman of the English department, helped train Bing in elocution, teaching him to roll rs, carol vowels, assert consonants, and distinguish the elements, patterns, and meanings of speech. Bing memorized and delivered with gusto recitations by Elijah Kellogg, the nineteenth-century clergyman who wrote “Spartacus to the Gladiators”; Robert W. Service, the popular Canadian poet responsible for “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”; and others. He once said, “If I am not a singer, I am a phraser. Diseur is the word. I owe it all to elocution.” The enunciation tricks learned from Father Shipsey became habit and mask, a front underscored by his affection for ten-dollar words, faux-British circumlocutions, and spiel worthy of riverboat gamblers. Bing’s diction would define his radio persona, frequently bordering on intentional self-parody.

  James Gilmore, a young, well-liked chemistry instructor who led field trips throughout Spokane and sang a good bass harmony, was obsessed with inventing a tonic to grow hair. He recruited Bing as a guinea pig, an indication that the diseur’s thinning hair was noticeable even in his teens. While his friends were sheared at the on-campus Blue & White Shop (“Tonsorial Art by Tonsorial Artists”), Bing endured private sessions with Mr. Gilmore, who — though unable to save his leery volunteer from a life sentence of “scalp doilies” — eventually brought to market a product called Gilmore Hair-More. 11 Bing grew to care less. Alone among the Hollywood stars of his era and stature, he never concealed his reliance on or distaste for toupees. Unlike John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart, who never appeared without them, Bing wore his only for professional purposes, when he could not get by with a hat. Errol Flynn was so amused by Bing’s willingness to attend sporting events, restaurants, and parties without a rug that he once walked over to his table and planted a (photographed) kiss on top of Bing’s bare head. Film work was another story. When submitted a script, Bing counted the outdoor scenes where a hat could square the issue, and sometimes demanded more. Writers accommodated him; wardrobe provided every kind of hat, cap, and turban imaginable.

  Bing maintained a B average in his freshman year, excelling in English. But playacting and music were becoming increasingly important to him, and he emerged as a school favorite, rivaling his friend and supreme big man on campus Mike Pecarovich. Mike was the tall, handsome student council president, gifted athlete (a disciple of Dorais, he later coached Gonzaga and Loyola), and leading man in Gonzaga theatricals. He was two years older than Bing, who first supported, then costarred, and finally eclipsed him; Mike could neither sing nor get laughs. Yet most would have bet on Mike to succeed, especially after he appeared in a production of The Bells at Santa Clara University and, according to the Spokane Daily Chronicle, “drew raves from California critics.” 12 If Bing minded in the least playing second fiddle, he must have enjoyed the sublime revenge, a dozen years later, of giving him bit parts in a few pictures. By the 1990s, Gonzaga students could stroll through Pecarovich Field and study at Crosby Library.

  A month into his first semester, Bing performed in a musical program at a smoker with the short-lived Republican Quartette, including his accomplice from the Boone Avenue gang Ralph Foley. Despite the cynical election of Warren G. Harding to the presidency that season, the GOP was not yet synonymous with plutocratic conservatism, certainly not in the state of Washington, where Republicanism was associated with statehood, achieved over long-term Democratic opposition.

  A musical event of greater import that year was the release of Paul Whiteman’s first record, “Whispering” and “The Japanese Sandman,” which sold 2.5 million copies. Whiteman’s dance music was far more grounded in Viennese salons than in jazz, yet that record captured the attention of an era, with its novel slide-whistle solo (to which no less than King Oliver paid homage in his 1923 “Sobbin’ Blues”) and gentle Dixieland ingredients like muted brasses and lively banjo-driven rhythms. Whiteman would dominate the recording industry for the next decade, until Bing supplanted him. His records, released on an average of one a month, enchanted Bing and countless other would-be musicians around the countr
y.

  A few weeks later the Gonzaga Dramatic Club presented the comedy The Dean of Ballarat in St. Aloysius Hall, to benefit the student band. “Each player seemed especially fitted for his part,” the school paper reported, noting that Bing portrayed “a colored aristocrat with the dignity and willingness to receive ‘tips’ so common to that class.” 13 He billed himself as Harry L. Crosby, Jr., A.B. ’24, for the first time, suggesting an attempt to try on his father for size, and at least a subliminal acknowledgment that acting was serious stuff but also an improvident activity belonging to the Happy Harry sphere of life. Shortly before the semester ended, he again appeared in blackface, for Gonzaga University Glee Club’s minstrel show A Study in Tone and Color. Only Bing was featured twice — in a duet with Dirty Sixer Joe Lynch, on “That Shakespearian Rag,” and as soloist on “When the Moon Shines.” He also played one of four end men who “kept the entire audience in a continuous uproar.” 14 Whatever appeal blackface had for the other end men (among them Leo Lynn), for Bing it represented a bond with the mighty Al Jolson, whose talents he broadly emulated. 15

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  The importance of minstrelsy in the development of America’s popular arts can hardly be overstated, and Crosby was steeped in it. The genesis of American minstrelsy has been credited to an English music-hall performer, Charles Matthews, who while touring the South in 1822 became intrigued with Negro music and dialect. Blackening his face with burnt cork, he offered himself as an interpreter of “Ethiopian” melodies. Contemporaneously, a group of black performers in New York, frustrated because Negro patrons were not allowed to attend theaters, staged Richard III at the corner of Mercer and Bleecker Streets. They did not get to tour the country. The minstrels did. Negro minstrelsy, as it was called regardless of the performers’ race, was the only acceptable conduit for what was thought of as native Negro artistry. Though antebellum troupes were white, the form developed in a forced racial collaboration, illustrating the axiom that defined — and continues to define — American music as it developed over the next century and a half: African American innovations metamorphose into American popular culture when white performers learn to mimic black ones.