by Gary Giddins
After extensive listening and long chats with Henderson, Duke Ellington, and others, Whiteman concluded that the best jazz musicians were black, and he proposed to sign some, including his friend ragtime pianist and songwriter Eubie Blake. His management came down hard: in addition to all the lost bookings in the South and some in the North, he would risk humiliating his black musicians, who would be relegated to separate entrances, dining and boarding facilities, and even toilets. Whiteman acquiesced but countered with his determination to hire black arrangers. He wasn’t the first to do so: his chief rival, Vincent Lopez, had challenged the Aeolian Hall triumph with a competing concert of his own, commissioning new pieces by Henderson and W. C. Handy. Whiteman moved more slowly: a few years later he would trade arrangements with Henderson while a young black composer, William Grant Still, would emerge as his most prolific staff writer. In the interim, he went looking for white musicians who could play authentic jazz, the real thing. So he was intrigued when his manager and financial adviser, Jimmy Gillespie, raved about an act at the Metropolitan, two young men, one a terrific baritone. Whiteman said, “If you think they’re the bees’ knees, bring em to me. 3
The day after they got the call, Bing and Al walked backstage at the Million Dollar Theater and knocked on Whiteman’s dressing-room door. Gillespie admitted them. Bing remembered the huge Whiteman sitting on a bed “looking like a giant Buddha, and he had a pound of caviar in his lap and a bottle of champagne on his breakfast table… the ultimate in attainment.” 4 In later years the more homespun Rinker remembered Whiteman sitting in his dressing gown drinking beer, but when Bing and Whiteman were alive, neither Rinker nor anyone in the room contradicted Bing’s often repeated recollection. If Bing did inflate his depiction of Whiteman’s “habiliments of success,” 5 it would not be surprising. His vision of the orchestra leader is remarkably consistent with the aspirations of Bing’s boyhood poem “A King,” the dream now conferred upon a real monarch (of sorts), “in robes of white / With vassals kneeling left and right.”
In his memoir, Bing said they performed a few numbers in the dressing room, perhaps to disguise the fact that Whiteman had offered them a job without having heard them. Instead, he had dispatched two trusted musicians to the theater to see whether Crosby and Rinker were as good as Gillespie claimed. Pianist Ray Turner dismissed them as “cute,” 6 but violinist and arranger Matty Malneck was impressed. Malneck said of their act, it was “like hearing a great jazz player for the first time.” 7 Malneck (yet another former student of Wilberfore Whiteman) was one of the band’s few advocates for recruiting genuine jazz players, so his word was good enough for Paul.
According to Al, Whiteman made a point of saying that he had seen the act before making his offer. “You guys are good,” he told them. “How would you like to join my band?” He offered them a featured spot at $150 a week each. They would begin by touring the Balaban and Katz circuit and wind up in New York, where Paul was scheduled to open his own nightclub and perform in a Charles Dillingham show on Broadway. They would be paid extra for their work in his club, for Broadway, and for each Victor record they made with the band. With options, the contract could bind them for five years. “Well, how does that sound?” he asked. “Go ahead, boys, talk it over.” 8
The two young men exchanged grins. Bing spoke up. “Al and I don’t have to talk it over, Mr. Whiteman,” he said. “We accept your offer. How soon would you want us to start?” “As soon as possible,” Whiteman told them, at which point Al said to Bing, “Say, what about our contract with Jack Partington?” (They were signed to Partington through November.) Whiteman thought for a moment and advised them to complete the contract and join the band for its three-week stay in Chicago. “That will give you a couple of weeks to relax,” he said. The next day they returned to Whiteman’s dressing room with Al’s dad to sign the papers. Before taking off on his tour, Whiteman shook hands with them and said, “So long, I’ll see you sprouts in Chicago.” 9
Mildred was delighted, as was Partington, relieved perhaps that they intended to honor their contract. Eleven months and one week before, Bing and Al had left Spokane in a Tin Lizzie, “just to see my sister and hoping we could get something going,” Al marveled. 10 Now they were about to work with their idol, scaling what Bing described as the Mount Everest of show business. 11 Al thought he was living a Horatio Alger fable. Bing credited luck. Yet it would be a mistake to discount the appeal and originality of their act. Audiences loved them, and Whiteman wasn’t risking much. He wanted something fresh and jazzy, something for young people, and who better than these two clean-cut kids? He had no way of knowing that in signing them, he had put into motion the career of the first in a long line of white musicians who popularized real black music (jazz, not mammy singing) for a white public. This was ten years before Benny Goodman launched the Swing Era, thirty before Elvis Presley rocked.
Bing and Al marked time at the Metropolitan, reprising Russian Revels. But a couple of days later, the pair chalked up another first: a chance to make a record. Don Clark, a saxophonist who had worked with Whiteman before starting his own band, led the Biltmore Hotel Orchestra and had a Columbia Records session booked for October 18; he invited Bing and Al to sing the vocal choruses on two numbers. On ethical grounds, they should have passed; legally they were pushing their luck. They had just signed with Whiteman, a Victor artist who expected them to make their wax debut under his auspices. They accepted instantly. “We were kind of excited to hear how we would sound,” Al explained. 12 Clark gave them lead sheets for two tunes, asking them to work up a harmonized chorus on each. The material was undistinguished: “I’ve Got the Girl!,” a weak tune by Walter Donaldson, who later wrote some of their most important Whiteman records, and “Don’t Somebody Need Somebody,” a throwaway by Abe Lyman, the cowriter of “Mary Lou.” No major recording career got off to a more dismal start than Bing’s.
The session took place in a hastily converted warehouse at Sixth and Bixel, and was engineered electrically. Bing and Al had to sing into a megaphone-like mike built into the planks of the recording booth. The Lyman tune was abandoned when Bing and Al could make nothing of it, and Peggy Bernier, a vaudeville trouper with pretty eyes and long bangs, fared no better. For all the good it did the boys or Clark, “I’ve Got the Girl!” ought to have been junked, too. Singing into a horn for the first time, Bing and Al could not sustain the blend of their voices. As a result, their recorded chorus is dominated by Al’s higher voice, though it is moored by Bing’s weighty, more controlled timbre. They sing Rinker’s treatment of the nattering tune energetically, inserting a measure of scat at the first turnback and attempting a unison portamento that got away from them. The performance did not do justice to their act — but then again, it wasn’t meant to. Their names did not appear on the label, and their complicity was further disguised by an accident: the record — backed with another Clark performance, “Idolizing,” vocal by one Betty Patrick — was inadvertently released at a fast speed. 13 Bing and Al sound like chipmunks.
The day after the session, Variety ran an item on the boys’ extraordinary new contract with Whiteman, to begin “in Chicago in the Publix houses.” 14 Weeks later the Spokane Chronicle reported that “they made a number of Columbia phonograph records,” 15 along with other ballyhoo that suggested a boneheaded attempt at public relations, probably by Everett. Not surprisingly, “I’ve Got the Girl!” promptly disappeared. Bing never spoke of it, and it lay unknown to avid Crosby collectors until 1951, when Ed Mello and Tom McBride published the first Crosby discography and failed to include it. After showing it to Bing, Larry Crosby wrote Mello, “Bing is well pleased.” But he pointed out that Bing told him his first record was with Don Clark’s orchestra “in 1926 or 1927 for Columbia — he thinks with Al Rinker. Do you have any record on this?” 16 A year later a collector in San Francisco found a copy. Larry’s doubt about Rinker was not shared by Bing, who recalled their duet well enough to sing a few measures for interviewers as late
as 1976.
They finished at the Metropolitan with Joy Week on October 28, and two days later hit San Francisco to fulfill their debt to Partington. Before leaving, they sold their Dodge, and Mildred gave them a farewell party. Partington’s revues rotated weekly — Dancing Around, Jazz a la Carte, Way Down South. In the cast of the first two was Peggy Bernier, on whom Bing developed a crush that would later blossom into a woozy affair. But Bing and Al spent most of their time in San Francisco playing golf on the public links and — eager to impress Whiteman — working up new songs. During their final days with the company, they were preoccupied with the problem of filling a two-week interval before heading for Chicago. They may not have noticed the quiet revolution taking place in American entertainment: NBC had just launched the first radio network. The boys decided that after ending their run in Way Down South, they would visit Spokane. They made calls to line up a job. Within days the Spokane Chronicle trumpeted their return and a “big production” scheduled for the Liberty Theater. 17
Their reception at the Northern Pacific depot was a modest rendition of Hail the Conquering Hero, with a clamoring retinue of family and friends. Al’s family had relocated to Los Angeles, so they stayed at Bing’s home. Kate pointed out that her son had gained weight. Surrounded by neighbors on the Crosby porch, Bing sat a four-year-old named Mary Lou Higgins on his lap and sang “Mary Lou.” She began sobbing uncontrollably. 18 The prodigal sons palled around with the gang, squired women, played golf at Downriver Park, and did four shows daily. Ray Grombacher, who operated the Liberty — and the adjoining music shop that had been Al and Bing’s graduate school — hired them for five days at the fancy price of $350. They opened at 11:00 P.M.on the evening before Thanksgiving, opposite a popular Paramount comedy, We’re in the Navy Now, starring Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton. That night their old stomping ground, the Clemmer Theater, made do with Stella Dallas and no live acts. The Liberty’s newspaper ads emphasized the movie but added: “And then just to make it the best show in town Ray A. Grombacher presents Bing Crosby & Al Rinker in their own original novelty.” 19 The ad included pictures of the pair in matching jackets and bow ties, along with their billing, “Two Boys with a Piano and a Voice.”
“We were both a little nervous,” Al remembered. “It was a lot different playing to all of our hometown friends.” 20 But after the first show, the nervousness disappeared. They headlined in a “six-act pot-pourri” 21 at the “midnight matinee” 22 and went over big. The Spokesman-Review reported “songs and songalogues last night, with Rinker at the ‘ivories’; Crosby lent the jazz touch to the act by playing a solo on cymbals. The big crowd went wild over their mixture of harmony and comedy.” 23 The Chronicle further mythologized their flivver (comparing it to Elijah’s “flaming chariot”) and their ascendancy “to affluence in the song world,” and noted their impending departure for “Gotham’s high-priced whirl.” 24 No mention was made of the coming tour of Chicago and the Midwest. The big news was that they would appear on Broadway in a Charles Dillingham production.
“It isn’t what the boys do, but the way they do it,” one reporter concluded, citing Bing’s “timely crashes on a diminutive cymbal.” 25 For five days they performed at three, six, seven, and nine. Grombacher boasted that on the first day alone, 9,000 people saw the show and another 1,500 were turned away. At last he was compensated for the records Bing and Al did not buy at Bailey’s. Yet for Bing the memory of their visit was compromised: “Somebody sneaked into our dressing room and stole our money while we were on stage, a heinous thing to do to a fellow in his home town,” he recalled. 26 They were able to earn some of it back with a show in the Italian Gardens of the Davenport Hotel, but they were not sorry to leave town. Bing’s family and friends cheered and wished them luck as the boys boarded the Great Northern to join Paul Whiteman’s band, the most famous in the world. Spokane did not lay eyes on Bing again for eleven years.
The train was three days getting to Chicago. Relying on a friend’s recommendation, they taxied to the Eastgate Hotel on Michigan Avenue. (“This time we checked in double,” Al recalled, referring to their old dodge of going two for one.) 27 Whiteman was booked for three weeks in Chicago, a different theater each week. He closed at the Chicago Theater on the Saturday the boys arrived, and would hit the Tivoli — with Bing and Al — on Monday. On their last day to themselves, Bing and Al toured the city, learning the ways of the elevated train, which they would be using to get to the theater on the South Side. Bing attended a football game. His old friend Ray Flaherty was in town, playing with the New York Yankees, and Bing sat on the bench. They went out afterward for drinks and dinner, and Bing told Ray that there would be a pass in his name at the Tivoli.
Monday morning — December 6, 1926 — they packed blazers and got to the theater as the bandstand was set up. Whiteman arrived at noon, delighted to find them waiting: “Well, I see you made it, and right on time.” 28 He introduced them to the musicians (“They seemed very pleased to have us with them,” Al recalled) but asked Bing and Al to sit out the two afternoon shows, to get a feel for the production from backstage. The show dazzled them as much as it had in Los Angeles. By evening they were nervous but raring to go. Whiteman gave them a pep talk and went to work. Al described their initiation:
The first evening show was about to start and we were all made-up and ready. There was a full house out front. Whiteman told us that we would go on about the middle of the show and that he would introduce us as Crosby and Rinker, who were making their first appearance with his band. Well, our turn finally came and Paul walked out and started our introduction. What he said was far different than what we had expected. He told the audience that he had heard two young boys singing in an ice cream parlor in a little town out west, called Walla Walla. “They sang some songs and I wondered what they were doing in Walla Walla. These kids were good, too good for Walla Walla, so I asked them to join my band. This is their first appearance with the band and here they are. I want you to meet Crosby and Rinker. Come on out boys.” The little piano was moved on stage and Bing and I came out from the wings. All I know is that we got a big hand after our first song and even more applause on our second number. To top it all, we were called back for an encore. That was our first appearance on the big time. You can bet we were two happy guys. Whiteman came over to us after the show and said, “Well, how do you feel? I knew they’d like you. Welcome to the band!” 29
Whiteman’s introduction established a receptive mood in the audience but failed to impress the names of his recruits on a Chicago Daily News reporter, who referred to them as Bing Rinker and Bill Crosby. 30 A small incident after the show presaged Crosby’s immense impact on popular music. One of the three songs he and Al performed was “In a Little Spanish Town,” a nervy choice considering they had originally nabbed it from Whiteman and his trombonist-singer Jack Fulton, who sang it at the Million Dollar Theater. Before they left for the hotel, Whiteman notified Fulton that the song would now be done by the new boys. Fulton was irate and let everyone know it. Al felt guilty and half a century later took pains to justify himself. He told a Crosby biographer that he and Bing did not realize it was Fulton’s number; he wrote in his memoir that Whiteman forced it on them. (In fact, Whiteman allowed them to choose their own songs.) Perhaps Bing also felt pangs — he did not record it for nearly thirty years.
Jack Fulton, however, had recorded it with Whiteman three months earlier, and his version was just then reaching the stores. By Christmas it was the biggest record in the country. Whiteman had no choice but to return it to the man who made it nationally famous. Yet Paul’s switcheroo served as a warning to those present: the effeminate, semifalsetto style typified by Fulton and the other musician-singers was not long for this world. 31
Bing’s stay in Chicago was eventful for other reasons, too. After Whiteman completed his week at the Uptown Theater, he reserved the cavernous Orchestra Hall for two days of recording, on December 21 and 22. The first produced three acceptabl
e instrumentals. The second was less productive. “Bunch of Happiness,” a feature for the band’s high-voiced trio — Fulton, Young, and Gaylord — was deemed unsatisfactory and shelved. The same fate befell “Pretty Lips,” a Walter Donaldson tune designed to introduce Crosby and Rinker. Though four takes failed to jell, the arrangement showed enough promise to warrant another try at a later date. The session’s only acceptable number was a rendition of Ruth Etting’s “Wistful and Blue.” Coupled with an instrumental from the day before, it was the first of nearly one hundred titles Bing and Al recorded under White-man’s aegis. Dated as it is today, their record debut was novel in 1926.
Max Farley, a Whiteman saxophonist, arranged “Wistful and Blue” ‘s odd eighteen-bar theme for the orchestra, but the vocal chorus was treated separately; the singers were backed by viola, guitar, and bass. Matty Malneck, waiting for this kind of opportunity, arranged the vocal passage, using his viola as a third voice in unison with Bing and Al. With Wilbur Hall strumming guitar and John Sperzel keeping a yeoman beat on bass, they sing a straight chorus with a two-bar break, followed by a stop-time scat chorus that evolves into a chase between voices and viola. Rinker’s voice dominates the duet, but it was the general jazziness of the vocal interlude — not the individual talents of the singers — that made the record a turning point for Whiteman; this zesty brand of singing was unknown to most of his public. Bing credited Malneck’s arrangement with helping him and Al forge “a new style… a vocal without words.” 32