Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  But Morrissey was having trouble making ends meet. At one performance he informed the audience that the show could not continue because Freed had reneged on payments. In the audience was the agent and future producer Edward Small, who offered to underwrite the cost of completing the performance. Morrissey had other troubles, however, including drinking heavily and bouncing the cast’s checks. Everyone was relieved when the show went on tour. But before the company pulled out of Los Angeles, Morrissey arranged for himself and several members of his cast to appear at an extravagant benefit for the American Legion at the Olympic Auditorium. Bing and Al found themselves on a once-in-a-lifetime bill of some thirty acts, among them Eddie Cantor, Tom Mix, Fanny Brice, Pola Negri, Jackie Coogan, and one of Bing’s perennial idols, Charlie Chaplin.

  One admirer who phoned their apartment was Jack Partington, a producer of stage shows for two key theaters in the Paramount-Publix chain: the new Metropolitan in Los Angeles and the Granada in San Francisco. Bing was out on the golf course, so Al went alone to see Partington, an amicable man who got right down to business. He liked the act and wanted to sign them for his two theaters. Al initially tried to act casual, but when Partington offered them $300 a week, twice what they were earning with Morrissey, he quickly accepted. Bing could hardly believe it when he heard the news that evening. The next morning they drove to Partington’s office and signed a two-month contract that was to take effect after they fulfilled their commitment to Morrissey.

  When the Morrissey revue opened in San Diego, the duo was finally raised from the pit to a platform that extended beyond the stage. The local paper raved about their up-to-date selection of “red-hot mama songs” and credited them with “stealing the show from those billed as stars.” It described Bing and Al as “two young men whom the audience… wanted to take home and use for permanent amusement.” 51 Some women who could not take them home made themselves available backstage, but these admirers were not numerous enough to keep the show in the black, and after the company made the jump from four days in San Diego to a full month in San Francisco, empty seats indicated greater trouble ahead.

  The situation got worse after Bing took the opportunity to resume his friendship with Bill Hearst, who insisted on taking the entire cast, not least the chorus girls, to the campus at Berkeley. Hearst’s frat brothers provided a washtub filled with pure gin, an ice block, and a decorative orange that was supposed to camouflage the liquid as punch. Plastered along with the rest of the performers, Bing pulled a Bea Lillie, singing his repertoire of risqué songs, including “Where’d Ya Stay Last Night,” the Aphrodite/nightie number that had so amused Phil Harris. “Our show bordered on the — shall we say outré?” Bing later admitted, 52 but he denied that the Hearst party was the orgy implied by campus officials, who suspended a few students and prohibited the rest from attending Morrissey’s midnight shows, thus hastening its demise. Bing felt guilty about the blow to Morrissey, perhaps more than he would have had he not signed the impending deal with Partington. But Berkeley’s entire student body could not have saved the show. After the midnight performance on September 11, the company packed it in. 53

  * * *

  Partington revised the team’s contract to encompass a two-month obligation, between September 18 and November 19, beginning and ending in San Francisco. Bing and Al had a week to kill before the commitment began, and when they read in the paper that Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, on whose records they had teethed, were arriving by rail to play a month at Grauman’s Million Dollar Theater, they decided to join the welcoming throng. The band, recently returned from Europe, was at the peak of its popularity. Al recalled that as they approached the station early in the morning, he and Bing “were more than excited.” 54 They watched in awe as such celebrated musicians as trumpeter Henry Busse and tiny banjoist Mike Pingitore stepped onto the platform, followed by the great man himself —oversize in everything but his razor-thin mustache. “We stood watching until they all got off,” Al wrote, “then drove away knowing that we had seen the most famous band in the world, in the flesh.”

  Whiteman opened the next day, September 16, and Bing and Al were there when the curtain rose, revealing some thirty musicians in blue-and-gray uniforms. The maestro bowed and lifted the baton, and, in Al’s words, “the sound was like nothing we ever heard,” big, full, and beautiful, with a complement of violins to soften the brasses and saxophones. 55 Busse played his puckish trademark, “Hot Lips,” Pingitore his bracingly strummed “Linger Awhile,” and Wilbur Hall his fleet “Nola” on trombone and “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on bicycle pump. A vocal trio drawn from the band, made up of trombonist Jack Fulton, guitarist Austin (Skin) Young, and violinist Charles Gaylord, rendered sweet, high-pitched harmonies. Fulton, in his effeminate, almost flaccid style, sang a new song, “In a Little Spanish Town,” through a megaphone. Bing liked the number and quickly added it to his repertoire, but the singer who caught his attention was Skin Young, whose “sensational” style and “tremendous range” was, he recalled, reason enough to attend the show a second time. Bing claimed, “He could not only sing things like The Road to Mandalay, he could sing blues songs and fast rhythm songs and he could make sounds as uninhibited as a pre-Cab Calloway.” 56 Bing’s high praise is not supported by Young’s pallid recordings, but his description uncannily portends the Crosby emerging that year.

  Two days later Bing and Al were back in San Francisco, featured players in Partington’s Purple and Gold Revue, which within a week was revised and renamed Bits of Broadway. Paramount-Publix billed them as “Crosby and Rinker — Two Boys and a Piano — Singing Songs Their Own Way.” They delighted audiences and reviewers, one of whom singled out Bing’s customary “Mary Lou.” Shortly before the company was set to return to the Metropolitan in Los Angeles, Variety ran a review by its San Francisco-based reporter, Robert J. Landry (later the trade’s managing editor). The boys’ first major notice appeared under the heading NEW ACTS and ignored the rest of the revue.

  Crosby and Rinker

  Songs

  Granada, San Francisco

  Two boys from Spokane and not new to show business, but new to picture house work. They appeared with Will Morrissey s Music Hall Revue, and were a success in a show that was a flop. Bringing their methods to the Granada, they registered solidly and on the crowded Sunday performances practically stopped the show.

  The duo works with a piano and minus orchestral accompaniment. Blues of the feverish variety are their specialty. They are well equipped with material, presumably their own. Young and clean cut, the boys found a quick welcome. When they have completed their weeks locally, they will unquestionably find a market for their wares in other presentation houses.

  Wherever the public goes for “hot” numbers served hot, Crosby and Rinker ought to have an easy time. 57

  In Los Angeles, a tougher town, Bits of Broadway expanded to include a fourteen-piece pit orchestra, additional acts, and the banjo-playing emcee, Eddie Peabody, who was entrusted with much of the responsibility for keeping the show running on time (a necessity as the four and five daily performances were programmed around an unwavering movie schedule). For their spot, Crosby and Rinker commenced with the surefire “Five Foot Two” and then debuted their version of the new song appropriated from Whiteman, “In a Little Spanish Town.” The stage was dimmed except for small blue spots trained on each of them. Microphones were not yet in use, but as Al recounted, the team had the complete attention of a capacity audience of 2,500 when they did the tune. It instantly became one of their biggest successes, a signature song like “Mary Lou,” and the first in the long string of modern standards associated with Bing — if only during his season in vaudeville.

  Composed by young Mabel Wayne, “In a Little Spanish Town” is a Latin-tinged waltz built on alternating dotted-eighth and sixteenth notes with two-measure lulls at the end of each phrase. It gave play to Bing’s rhythmic pluck and provided Al with plenty of room for piano fills. The lyrics came fr
om the team of Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, whose hits included “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” and other Jolson benchmarks as well as the duo’s standby, “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue.” For some reason (perhaps in deference to Whiteman or because he wearied of it), Bing did not record “In a Little Spanish Town” until 1955, when he cut a jazzy piano-trio version for a radio broadcast and released it on an album.

  To dress up their rhythm songs, Bing and Al began to interpolate unison scat breaks in imitation of two trumpets. King Oliver and Louis Armstrong had made this kind of thing famous in jazz circles, but it was certainly novel and possibly unprecedented in vaudeville. Suddenly, Bing and Al found themselves routinely stopping the show. This is not showbiz hyperbole; they stopped the proceedings flat as the audience howled for more. The emcee, Eddie Peabody, whom Al thought was jealous but who may simply have been trying to keep the show on schedule, did everything he could think of to throttle the audience, but to no avail. Time had to be allotted for two or more encores. For Bing and Al’s second week at the Metropolitan, the show was revised as Russian Revels. Most of the revelers who bought tickets were drawn by the coolly irreverent cutups from Spokane. Those two offered something fresh and modern, and they put over their art with energy and humor and without airs.

  Red Norvo, a vaudevillian of eighteen, was laid up with typhoid fever in a small hotel not far from the Metropolitan when Bing and Al did the Partington shows. “When I got strong enough,” he recalled, “I walked across the park over to a theater and I just felt like going in ‘cause I’d been sick so long. The thing that knocked me out was Rinker and Crosby. Just crazy. They pushed a piano out on stage, a little upright that Al played. Bing had a little cymbal hooked on the edge of the piano, you know, with the lid back? And they’d sing and they were scat singing even then. Their time was good and they did cute tunes. I would say it was jazz in those days, yeah. It was a sharp act.” 58 They did scat exchanges on kazoos (“terrible sounding things,” Bing said); 59 incorporating a trick picked up from Mound City Blue Blowers records, they played them into coffee tins. “It gave out a wah-wahing sound I thought jazzy,” Bing explained. 60 During the third week at the Metropolitan, the show was reworked as Joy Week, and Crosby and Rinker were billed second to Peabody.

  They were the Jazz Age personified, two clean-cut white boys bringing a variation on black music to the vaudeville stage with panache and charm. They represented something borderline radical: a trace of danger, a current from a generation that threatened to bust out of old and settled traditions. At no time between the Civil War and Prohibition had the nation’s young people clamored for a music of their own or rebelled against the songs of their parents. Partly because the jazziness of Two Boys and a Piano stopped a few stations north of the genuine article, the young men — Bing was twenty-three and Al two months short of nineteen — suggested youth and daring in a way that did not send the “cornfeds” running for cover. They charmed everyone yet were harbingers of a break with conventions, a fissure gradually developing in the American family. Bing, especially, signaled the change with his easy wit; cool, distant manner; and unmistakably virile baritone. When he sang a song, he created drama.

  Al, who had idolized Bing for so long, knew his partner communicated more powerfully as a soloist than through his hotcha settings for two voices and encouraged his partner to do more ballads, more solos. Al’s arrangements were loosely harmonized, drawn from jumping instrumental numbers. The blend of his voice with Bing’s was edgy, not self-consciously adroit in the manner of the old barbershop quartets nor as rigorous and inventive as the Mills Brothers or Boswell Sisters, who followed on their heels. But their loose open-collared style worked in their favor. They improvised until a routine was nailed, then stuck with it, as every vaudeville team did. Yet Bing and Al were able to contrive the illusion of spontaneity; each audience felt that it was seeing something different from what others saw. When Bing sang alone, the attitude of the audience changed from jokey camaraderie to rapt empathy. Drawing on the soulfulness of Irish laments, Jewish theater, and African American blues, Bing could take a ballad to the cliff’s edge of sentimentality without going over. He was too honest, too respectful to be manipulative. The audience could trust him with its emotions.

  Before their first week at the Metropolitan was up, Bing was handed a note backstage: Paul Whiteman wanted to see them. “We thought someone on the bill was kidding us,” Bing told columnist Ed Sullivan in 1939. The next morning Bing answered the phone at the apartment and was about to hang up when Jimmy Gillespie convinced him that he really was the manager of Whiteman’s band and that the invitation was definitely on the level. The great man was completing his run at the Million Dollar Theater in a couple of days and wanted to see Bing and Al in his dressing room tomorrow. “After the phone call, Bing and I just looked at each other,” Al remembered. “We still couldn’t believe it wasn’t a joke. When we talked it over with Mildred, she said, ‘It doesn’t sound like a joke to me. This may be the chance you’ve been waiting for.’We hardly slept that night.” 61

  9

  WHITEMAN

  Home is Never Home Without PAUL

  A White Man

  A Good Man

  A Great Man

  — Variety, signed by thirteen (white) members of the New York musical community (1927) 1

  In late 1926 no American entertainer outside the movies was more famous, more acclaimed, or more caricatured than Paul Whiteman. Within a year Charles Lindbergh would fly across the Atlantic and forever raise the stakes on fame. But for the moment, the tall, egg-shaped Whiteman was the darling of the media — he could make news by announcing his latest plan for a diet. Fastidious in his bearing, he was the first genuine popular-music superstar, an idol mobbed coast to coast at railway stations in every city he played. When he returned from his first tour of Europe, in 1923, he was welcomed at the dock by New York’s mayor and police commissioner as well as by the heads of the musicians’ union, executives from the Victor Talking Machine Company, and seven bands, one playing from an airplane circling the arriving ship. To the delight of the hundreds of fans waiting at the dock, a skywriter lettered the air with HELLO PAUL. TO many, Whiteman personified the Jazz Age. You could scarcely avoid his mug, an illustrator’s delight, the original happy face: a swatch of slicked-back black hair, symmetrical brows and eyes, razor-thin waxed mustache, two chins.

  He was born in Denver, in 1890, the son of music educator Wilberforce J. Whiteman, who abominated jazz and broke with his son because of it. They were testily reconciled after Paul became celebrated as a national resource. (Two of the elder Whiteman’s other students, bandleaders Jimmie Lunceford and Andy Kirk, would become leading figures of the Swing Era; he must have considered himself a total failure.) Whiteman first attracted some attention in California, where he led a Barbary Coast ragtime outfit while holding down a viola chair in the San Francisco Symphony. After a stint in the navy, he organized a popular ballroom band in Los Angeles. In 1920 he opened in Atlantic City and signed with Victor. An instant favorite with the haut monde, he soon moved to New York’s Palais Royal as sales of his first record, “Whispering,” soared into the millions. Whiteman became internationally recognized after he presented An Experiment in Modern Music at New York’s Aeolian Hall in 1924. That concert introduced George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” with the composer at the piano. Whiteman himself was not a composer, but he was a powerful arbiter of taste and considered himself a dedicated advocate of jazz. Although “Rhapsody in Blue” later became world-famous as a symphonic work, the original version arranged by Ferde Grofe was a jolting — even rickety — montage of orchestral bumps and moans, beginning with a yawning clarinet cadenza, punctuated by pounding piano, and finishing with a lovely concerto-like melody. Though by no means a blues, it shivered with blues shadings.

  The Aeolian Hall concert was more than a premiere; it was a distillation of Whiteman’s argument with the music establishment. A passionate believer
in American music, he had insisted that a native classicism was in blossom, inspired by lowborn jazz, far beyond the realm of academic composers and European tradition. This concert was intended to make his case; as far as the critics were concerned, it did. From that point on, Whiteman was promoted as the King of Jazz. Yet no jazz was played at Aeolian Hall, except for an introductory performance of the creaky “Livery Stable Blues,” which Whiteman offered as an indication of jazz in its “true naked form.” 2 It was something to laugh at, a prelude to the scrupulously arranged and executed music Whiteman offered in its place — a concert ballroom music with damp rhythms and minimal improvisation.

  Whiteman was on the wrong boat. By 1926, when his star had risen still higher after another successful European tour and he and Mary Margaret McBride had published their book, Jazz, he knew it. His mistake had been in thinking of jazz strictly as inspiration for serious music, a resource rather than an art in itself. The same year he overwhelmed critics at Aeolian Hall, another landmark musical event had taken place, one that went unnoticed by the major dailies. Louis Armstrong had arrived in New York to play with the orchestra of Fletcher Henderson, Whiteman’s relatively low-profile African American counterpart. Armstrong’s impact was instantaneous, immeasurable, and absolute. He had transformed the music of Henderson and his chief arranger, Don Redman, and countless others, not least Whiteman. He infused the basic building blocks of true jazz — blues, swing, and improvisation — with depth and exhilaration. Whiteman was not about to give up his expansive instrumentation, semiclassical repertoire, or vaudeville variety, but now he was hungry for honest-to-God jazz musicians.