Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  By Al’s account they bypassed Portland, heading down the inland road through Oregon and the Siskiyou Mountains to California. Bing, however, recalled hitting Portland as well as Medford, Klamath Falls, and San Francisco. On the way, they alternated between fixing punctures and singing. Al wrote, “Bing would sing the melody and I would harmonize. The song ‘Dinah’ was one of our favorites and we really gave it a good workout.” 6 But as they got closer to their goal, Al privately began to worry. He had never written his sister, Mildred, to tell her they were coming and did not know how she would greet them.

  Driving 1,200 miles down the coast, they tried to average 200 miles a day. On cold mornings the car would not start, and they took turns with the crank. They went to a movie in Sacramento and were astonished at how much larger (2,000 seats) the theater was than the Clemmer; they marveled at the lavish Fanchon and Marco stage show, with its dancers, singers, chorus line, and emcee. “It was impossible for us to imagine, as we sat in that great big beautiful theater and watched those talented entertainers perform, that in a few months we would be up on that same stage singing our songs,” Al remembered. 7 Next morning they reached the San Joaquin Valley, driving past cotton fields and orange groves as the temperature climbed and then heading on to Fresno, Stockton, and Bakersfield, where a gas jockey warned them it was ninety miles to Los Angeles, mostly mountainous, and their jalopy might not make it. But what choice did they have? They switched into low gear and skulked the steep mountain road out of Bakersfield.

  At the top of Wheeler Ridge, the flivver either blew and was abandoned (Bing) 8 or held up for the three hours it took to get to the outskirts of Los Angeles (Al: “We made it, but just barely”), 9 where they searched for Sunset Boulevard. They knew Mildred lived a couple of blocks off the thoroughfare, at 1307 North Coronado. It was Saturday afternoon, November 7, when they walked up to her door and nervously knocked. A short, heavyset woman answered and squinted at them for an uncertain moment until Al said, “Don’t you know me? I’m your brother Alt.” They had not seen each other in nearly three years. “[Mildred] let out a holler and put her arms around me. She was so surprised she couldn’t believe it was me.” 10 Al introduced Bing while noting silently the weight she had gained. They described their trip and their ambitions, and she offered them a spare bedroom, suggesting that they store Bing’s drums in the cellar (where they remained until he sold them a few weeks later). As she prepared lunch, Mildred asked Al about their father and his new wife, Elsa. Al reassured her of their happiness and said that Elsa was taking good care of their brothers. Mildred, in turn, told him about her husband, Benny, who was doing well in the bootleg business. As for herself, she was singing at a speak near Hollywood operated by a friend of hers, Jane Jones. After describing the high-class customers and good tips, she invited them to tag along.

  At twilight Mildred, whom Bing instantly took to calling Millie, made cocktails and asked them to sing. In a flash they were at the piano. After a couple of tunes, she walked over and hugged and kissed each of them. “You guys are great,” she said. “You should have no trouble getting something going for yourselves.” 11 After another drink they asked her to sing. Millie sat at the piano and sang Irving Berlin’s “Remember” and Nora Bayes’s old hit “Just Like a Gypsy,” with, Al recalled, “the same feeling and style which later on would make her a star. I could see that Bing was really impressed, and I was very proud of my sister.” Benny Stafford returned in time for dinner and then drove them to Jane Jones’s speakeasy in the Hollywood Hills. 12 The boys liked Benny, thought him “a regular guy”

  Bing Crosby graduated from Gonzaga High School with a diploma in classical studies in 1920. Mark Scrimger Collection

  Bing practicing his swing at age four. Mark Scrimger Collection

  Bing’s mother, the former Kate Harrigan, during the years in Tacoma. Mark Scrimger Collection

  The infant Bing in Tacoma, with his aunt (Kate’s sister, Annie Walsh) on the steps of the Crosbys’J Street home. Mark Scrimger Collection

  Looking sporty at the new Sinto Avenue house in Spokane, Bing is hugged by his sister Mary Rose. Mark Scrimger Collection

  Six of the Crosbys on Sinto Avenue: left to right, Catherine, Kate (mother), Bing, Mary Rose, Harry (father), Ted. Mark Scrimger Collection

  The two-story clapboard house at 508 East Sharp Avenue, one block north of Gonzaga University and St. Aloysius Church. Mark Scrimger Collection

  Gonzagas main buildings, with the steeples of St. Aloysius to the right. King Crosby Collection, Foley Center, Gonzaga University

  Bing, circled, was the youngest in his high school class and looked it. Bing Crosby Collection, Foley Center, Conzaga University

  With Kate’s encouragement, Bing won seven swimming medals, including first place in diving and second place in the speed events. He excelled at baseball, first at third base, then center field, and fantasized about playing professionally. Mark Scrimger Collection

  At a gathering in the Gonzaga University gym in 1919, Bing can be seen near the bottom, over the word Bazaar.Bing Crosby Collection, Foley Center, Gonzaga University

  Bing learned to swim the hard way, among discarded logs at McGoldrick’s lumber mill on the northern bank of the Spokane River. Mark Scrimger Collection

  Mike Pecarovitch (center) was student council president and frequently shared the stage with Bing (right); by the 1990s Gonzaga students could stroll through Pecarovitch Field and study at Crosby Library. Bing Crosby Collection, Foley Center, Gonzaga University

  Top: Frank Corkery, Bing’s boy hood friend and fellow glee club member, later became president of Gonzaga University. Bing Crosby Collection, Foley Center, Gonzaga University

  Bottom: The Musicaladers posed in a publicity shot for their best and longest engagement, at Lareida s Dance Pavilion (below), originally an auto showroom. Left to right in striped blazers: Bob Pritchard, Clare Pritchard, Bing; in dark suits, Al Rinker, Miles Rinker. Mark Scrimger Collection

  The speakeasy, which Bing remembered as The Swede’s, was a converted private house set back from the road and surrounded by a fence. When the lookout saw Mildred, he let them into a large, crowded room with tables and bar and a small platform for the piano and singer. The place, frequented by movie people, offered working girls as well as booze and song. When the spirit moved her, the proprietress would sing a number or two. Red Norvo, who knew Jane Jones after Prohibition, when he was married to Mildred and living in New York, described her as a large woman with a brassy style. Customers preferred what he called “cooing types,” like Mildred or Tommy Lyman, a peripatetic singer-pianist who played chic clubs in New York and Europe and liked to stop by Jane’s when he passed through town. 13 But it was Millie who grabbed the audience with her repertoire of melodramatic warhorses such as “Ships That Never Came In.” Large tips — her only salary — always flowed like wine.

  In the years to come, Millie would recall Bing’s really gauging the spirit of the room that night and many that followed, shouting, “Sing it again!” or “Give the lady a twenty!” 14 When customers requested favorites, she dragged a bar stool over to where they sat. Bing was amazed when actor Eugene Pallette put a “Benjy” on her for two choruses of “Oh Daddy.” 15 He liked to tell the story of the evening when he and Al listened to Millie until closing. When the three arrived home, they slumped in the living room and talked until she announced that she was going to bed. Then, rising to her feet, she reached under her dress and pulled down her bloomers. A shower of twenty-dollar bills, dozens, hit the floor, covering her small feet.

  On his first evening in Hollywood, however, Bing may have been too smashed to notice anything. Benny Stafford kept buying rounds, and Bing downed them all. By the time the foursome left, at two, Bing had rubber legs. During the next few years, he would develop a reputation as a lush, but when genuine stardom beckoned, his talent for nursing one drink or forgoing a cocktail at all convinced many that he was never a true alcoholic. “There has been a lot of talk ab
out Bing being a heavy drinker when he was young,” Al observed. “Every once in a while when I worked with him he would go on a little binge, but he was not a steady drinker.” 16

  The next evening Bing and Al drove to the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel to see their former colleague from the Musicaladers, Jimmy Heaton, who was playing trumpet in Ray West’s orchestra. Jimmy was delighted to see them, and as the next day, Monday, was musicians’ night off, he suggested an outing. Jimmy drove his friends down to San Diego, where they stopped to visit his cousins (the Carr brothers, who had a band), then continued across the border to Tijuana, where Al and Bing were shocked by the aggressive whores who tried unsuccessfully to lure them into their shacks. On the way back they stopped at Ryan Airfield near San Diego, where Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis was assembled a year later. For three dollars, Bing and Al took a ride in the rear open cockpit of a plane, circling over the ocean. With the wind blowing in their faces, they were scared to death and held on with white-knuckled grips. Al recalled, “When we landed we couldn’t get out of that old Jenny fast enough.” 17 For Bing, the flight had long-lasting repercussions. He would avoid planes whenever possible for most of his life, preferring train travel or ocean liners. He was uneasy about heights, and in hotels reserved rooms on the lower floors.

  Bing and Al continued to live with Millie for a week or so, and she took them under her wing, making calls on their behalf and introducing them to her show-business friends. Mildred Bailey would one day be recognized as one of the first of the great women jazz singers, the key transitional figure between Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith and band singers like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Her small, light voice inclined to a whirring vibrato when she sang high notes, and her time and enunciation were exemplary. She was bedeviled, however, by a fierce temper, enormous pride, and a lonely soul that she attempted to soothe with food and compulsive cooking. She did not smoke or drink. Al thought she used the great dishes she prepared and her pets — a fleet of dachshunds — as a substitute for children. As sentimental as she was high-strung, she was an easy touch and a formidable enemy. Like many musicians, trombonist Milt Bernhart assumed that she was black when he heard her on the classic records she made with Teddy Wilson. 18 When he mentioned that to Red Norvo long after her death, Red chuckled and told him a story that he thought summed her up.

  In the 1930s, after Mildred became a star on radio and a headliner with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, a rival singer began spreading rumors that she was black, and a Hearst columnist picked up the story. Whiteman didn’t care in the least — he’d have hired black musicians if his management hadn’t talked him out of it. But Mildred was incensed. By this time, she and Red were married and traveling together as members of Whiteman’s band. One day she asked Paul if he was still friendly with William Randolph Hearst, whom the bandleader had known during his salad days in San Francisco. Paul said he was. Hearing this, she demanded that Whiteman phone Hearst and have the columnist fired. Whiteman complied, as did Hearst. A couple of years later, as Millie and Red emerged from a theater, a man in a threadbare overcoat walked over and asked, “Miss Bailey?” The former columnist apologized for what he had written, conceding that he deserved to lose his job, and turned to go. Mildred, convulsed with tears, asked his name and how she could reach him, then went to Whiteman and got him rehired.

  She had always been fond of Bing, and despite a misunderstanding or two, they would remain loyal to each other, the one invariably naming the other as his or her favorite singer. Bing credited Millie with the start of his career and reciprocated in full, engineering the Whiteman job that took her to the big time. In 1951 he assumed all her medical costs when she became fatally ill. Indeed, Millie got along better with the easygoing Bing, who liked a good time and shared her advanced and expansive musical tastes, than with her brother, who thought her “a little too barrelhouse.” 19 Al, who forgot that Bing had heard Mildred in Spokane, was at once proud and a little miffed about the bond between the two. “I guess he hadn’t expected to find that I had a sister with so much humor and who was so hip,” he wrote. To Bing, she was “tnucho mujer} a genuine artist, with a heart as big as the Yankee Stadium, and a gal who really loved to laugh it up.” 20 He admired her jazzy slang (a dull town was “tiredsville”), which was new to him. Clearly, the role she played in launching their careers was not limited to providing introductions and arranging auditions.

  Bing understood Millie’s rare abilities as a singer, her unaffectedness, understatement, and versatility. And she saw in him. the real thing, an antidote to the prissy aesthetes who had no swing or feeling for the blues. Bing, having won prizes in elocution, admired her impeccable diction; she encouraged his innate affinity for focusing on the language of a song, its meaning, the special story it told. She played records for him and Al, including Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and her pal Tommy Lyman, whose “Montmartre Rose” — the maudlin account of a Parisian courtesan with “a true heart of gold” — she played constantly 21 She listened to it so often that more than half a century later, Al could recite the lyric:

  And each tear is a token

  Of some heart that’s broken

  In your garden, my Montmartre Rose. 22

  More significantly, it appears to have been Millie who first told Bing of a young man in Chicago whom he had to hear if he was going to be a serious singer: Louis Armstrong. What makes this advice particularly fascinating is that as of November 1925, Armstrong had yet to record as a vocalist (beyond a scat break at the end of a Fletcher Henderson side) and Mildred had yet to travel to Chicago or New York to hear him. She was familiar with Louis’s trumpet playing from his records with Henderson and Bessie Smith and may have advised Bing to study his instrumental work, which had musicians nationwide buzzing. Millie told Norvo that she advised Bing of Armstrong’s genius for inventing melody; possibly she was referring to his powers as a trumpeter. But Norvo thought she was speaking of his singing. Armstrong often sang at jam sessions, so the advance word in the jazz grapevine may have been enough to inspire Mildred’s praise. Barry Ulanov said of his old friend, “Mildred was two things: very hip and very much a gossip…. She’d pick up on anything and if anyone would have known about Louis she would have known.” 23 Whatever the circumstances, Bing soon put Louis on a pedestal; their association would prove momentous musically, professionally, and — in advancing integration in show business — societally

  During Bing and Al’s first few days in California, nothing came of Mildred’s efforts on behalf of her lodgers. Bing hooked up with his brother Everett, who was selling trucks as a front for moving liquor. Ev also wanted to help the boys. What happened next is unclear. According to Bing, Mildred arranged an audition with Mike Lyman, the brother of bandleader Abe Lyman and the proprietor of the Tent Cafe. 24 Bing rented a tux and borrowed the accessories from Everett. Early accounts suggest that they did not get the job, although Bing would later claim that they worked the Tent Cafe as long as three weeks. Al would deny that he and Bing ever played the Tent Cafe; but he also disputed another audition of which there is no doubt. This one was arranged by Ev at the Cafe Lafayette. Harry Owens, who would play an important role in Bing’s career (as the composer of “Sweet Leilani”), led the band at the Lafayette, and Ev was a frequent customer. Having fared poorly with a “big, brassy and rhythmic” orchestra, Owens fired his expensive star soloists and switched to “the sweet ‘corn’ of ballads and violins.” 25 Success followed, and Everett pressed Owens to audition the boys. Owens tried to dissuade Ev from encouraging his kid brother in a career as unstable as show business, but Ev insisted that the kid had his mind set.

  Owens agreed to the tryout, and Bing and Al showed up in time to sit through an hourlong rehearsal. Then they took the stand, Al at the piano, Bing with a small cymbal in his hand. Before they completed their first number, the orchestra musicians, who had been filing out for their break, stopped and came back to applaud the finish. “Bing had a terrific beat,” Owens re
called, “but the voice was the thing.” 26 He scheduled them for the show on the following Tuesday; their opening went over well, but afterward Owens told them that he lacked the budget to offer a regular job. By his own subsequent reckoning, Owens “missed the boat” and allowed the duo to sail away into Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. Yet he recalled the young Bing with affection: “What a sweet guy he was and so sincerely grateful.” 27 In the last days of 1925, Bing told a reporter that he and Al got their start in Los Angeles at the Lafayette.

  Their real start, however, came when Mildred heard about open auditions for Fanchon and Marco, a sister-and-brother team famous in vaudeville as dancers, now producing traveling vaudeville units for Loew’s California circuit. Mildred drove the boys to the audition at the Boulevard Theater and ordered them to relax: “You’re good and I know they’ll like you.” 28 Fanchon, Marco, and their brother, Rube Wolf, sat quietly in the orchestra seats, watching the young performers. When their turn came, Bing and Al did a few rhythm songs (“China Boy” “San,” and “Copenhagen”), to which Bing added some business on kazoo, and two comical numbers (“Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home” and “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue”). They were hired at seventy-five dollars each per week for a thirteen-week tour in the new revue, The Syncopation Idea. Rehearsals began immediately at the Boulevard. They found themselves on a bill with jugglers, a dog act, a dance team, and a sixteen-girl high-kicking chorus line. The show opened on December 7, a month to the day since their arrival in Los Angeles.