by Gary Giddins
“We couldn’t decide which of us was boss,” Bing recalled. “Every three or four weeks we decided to break up, then the next day we’d get back together again.” 28 Bing could be cantankerous and was becoming unreliable. Some nights he was so green from drink that he had to be held up at the mike; on other nights he did not show at all. Barris was never without his flask, constantly nipping. Al tried to keep up, no easy task when he double-dated with Bix, but remained the most responsible — “I was too young to keep up with them” 29 — and was sometimes perceived by the others as a scold. The women they saw were chorus girls, of which there was a limitless supply.
When Whiteman played Philadelphia in December 1927, Bing met two roommates, Ginger Meehan and Dolores Reade, who were appearing in the road cast of Eddie Dowling’s Honeymoon Lane. The women would remain in his life, but as the wives of men with whom he had lifelong associations: in 1930 Ginger married Johnny Mercer, and three years later Dolores married Bob Hope. Dolores recalled, “Back in the Philadelphia days, if they couldn’t find Bing, they’d say, well, where was he last night, and they’d go and look for him under one of the tables.” 30
Francis Cork O’Keefe, the dapper manager who later advised Bing, also saw him at the Philadelphia engagement, having taken the train from New York because “people had been raving about a guy with Whiteman.” He found Bing “nervous and shy.” 31 O’Keefe may have been the first to suggest that he go out as a single, but Bing dismissed the idea; he did not even want to make a record under his own name. “I sat in the first row,” O’Keefe told an interviewer in 1946. “Harry Barris was the piano player, the clown of the crowd. Bing had the worst sore throat, but I heard him and liked him. I went backstage to say hello to the guys and met him. He had something, but then he was just another one of the fellows. They were trying to get him to make a solo record, but he laughed — said it was silly, no one wanted to hear him alone.” 32 O’Keefe worked on him for better than a year, to no avail. He was not ready.
Bing was more focused on Ginger Meehan, a quietly pretty, Brooklyn-born brunette with delicate features — just the type he preferred. One night in New York, at nearly 1:00 A.M., Bing wired Ginger at Philadelphia’s Emerson Hotel: ACCORDING TO US STATISTICS THERE ARE 7 MILLION PEOPLE HERE BUT WITHAL IM A STRANGER AND MISERABLY ALONE BECAUSE YOURE NOT ALONG LOVE UNDYING BEST REGARDS TO DOLORES AND STUFF. BING. 33 The affair continued on and off through the summer. When Whiteman pulled into Chicago in July, Ginger was already there, in the road company of Good News. Bing wired her at the Selwyn Theater: WOULD LIKE TO SAY HELLO THIS EVE AFTER YOUR PERFORMANCE SAY AT ELEVEN FIFTEEN. BING. 34 Six days later he wired her a few minutes before she went onstage: WOULD LIKE TO CALL YOU TONIGHT IF BUSY SUE ME BING. 35 Ginger didn’t Sue, but the romance fizzled, possibly because Bing became enamored of another Good News cast member, the star, Peggy Bernier, whom he had met twice before — at Don Clark’s recording session and in Jack Partington’s San Francisco revues. Bing’s infatuation with Peggy, who could keep up with his late-night carousing, lasted several months, unlike most of his romances, which were as fleeting as stops on a vaudeville circuit.
The good life took its toll on the Rhythm Boys. Whiteman complained that they no longer seemed as dedicated to their work. They stayed out late and looked beat at the early matinees. When the movie went on, they would repair to a nearby speakeasy and sometimes could hardly tear themselves away in time to make the next show. Merwyn Bogue,a worshipful young Whiteman fan who became popular in the 1930s as Kay Kyser’s trumpet player and comic foil, Ish Kabibble, got a close look at them on and off the bandstand. He first saw the Rhythm Boys when Whiteman opened at the Perry Theater in Erie, Pennsylvania. “The audience went wild” 36 as the trio, backed by Rinker on a tiny organ, belted out “Mississippi Mud.” Bogue attended all four shows every day of the engagement, and designated himself the boys’ guardian after he tailed them to a speakeasy one afternoon:
The boys muttered a password through the little peephole. A door opened, and we all went inside. The owner must have considered me part of the group. But nobody knew me from Bephus, and I sat off in a corner by myself. The three of them got something to drink, scooped handfuls of peanuts from a glass penny machine, and sat telling stories. I was so afraid they would be late for their next show that I appointed myself their timekeeper…. When I finally said [“Hey, fellows, you better start walking back or you’ll miss your next show”], they looked at me as if to say, “Who are you?” But they got up and left. After this had happened a few more times, one of them said, “Thanks kid.” They were never late for a show that whole week. 37
In 1949, when Ish Kabibble had a spot in the Crosby movie Riding High, he asked Bing “if he remembered a kid in an Erie speakeasy who always got him to the theater on time. He did a double take, swung his golf club at another wad of Kleenex, and said, ‘Was that you? Hey, those were the greatest peanuts I ever ate!’ “
The boys’ most grievous sin was their failure to “grow the act.” Whiteman assigned them roles on recordings, but he expected them to develop new material for concerts and their own record dates (which, like the band’s, were made at Columbia). In Bing’s estimation, “I don’t think we were too serious about our work, it was just something we liked to do, we enjoyed it and never really made a conscious effort to improve ourselves. Although we looked for new material all the time, it was difficult to get all three of us together at one time for a rehearsal. About the only time we did is when Whiteman had something for us to do with the big band and then we had to be there or we’d get the old sack.” 38
Whiteman had no intention of firing them, but he was losing patience and noticed that some theater audiences continued to resist the trio’s charms. As Variety observed, “There seem to be a lot of people in a picture house audience who don’t know what they’re trying to do or what it’s all about, but it’s funny, hot, and good.” 39 In July Whiteman summoned the boys to his office and, as Barris recalled, told them, “I’m taking the band on tour and if it’s okay with you, I’d like to place you on a vaudeville circuit.” 40 They had little choice. In a sense, Paul was exiling them from the band. He hoped that independence would straighten them out and spur their creativity. If they could cultivate audiences on their own, they would be a more attractive component in the orchestra’s presentations when he brought them home. Meantime, he would be increasing his income, taking a percentage of their tour in addition to receipts generated by the band. Paul promised that they would rejoin the orchestra when it returned to New York and that in the interim he would continue to use them on records.
On August 1 he gave the news to the press: the Rhythm Boys would be playing the Keith-Albee, Orpheum, and Proctor vaudeville circuit. Whiteman did, as he promised, bring them in for several studio sessions, but otherwise the boys were on their own for six months, through February 1929. While the band toured in the East, the Rhythm Boys traveled to their first stop: the Proctor Theater in Yonkers. They played most major Midwestern cities and a few eastern ones, dipping as far south as Nashville, usually to great acclaim. At each venue they were introduced by a life-size plywood cutout of Paul and a transcription of his voice. “Ladies and gentlemen,” it proclaimed, “I take great pleasure in presenting to you my Rhythm Boys.” 41
They began the tour in high spirits. The double challenge of big-time vaudeville and autonomy invigorated them, though not musically. For a while they worked out a comedy dance routine to “Baby Face,” taking turns as they parodied what Al described as “dime-a-dozen dance routines by second rate hoofers.” 42 Despite the jokey intent, those “corny” steps proved a useful part of Bing’s apprenticeship; he used them throughout his career, not only in routines with Bob Hope and Fred Astaire but in comic time steps and hand gestures that defined his persona in numerous films and TV shows. The boys also worked out a comic mind-reading routine, with Harry and Al engaging the audience as Bing did the swami bit onstage in a turban (prefiguring a routine in the 1946 Road to
Utopia). Bing acknowledged, “We had indifferent success. We went up and down. It depended. See, we’d been in vaudeville a lot and we’d been watching a lot of comics and we wanted to do comedy. And as a result, we weren’t singing hardly anything. And the managers of the different hotels and theaters objected to this strenuously. They thought they were booking a record seller, you know.” 43
Playing only two shows a day, beginning at 2:00 P.M., Bing and Al spent mornings on the golf course, renewing their friendship and perfecting their games; they played about equally well and always for a small amount of money. To their surprise, most of the best private courses in each city granted them admission. Harry didn’t play, but he kept busy writing songs and nursing his flask. In Columbus, Ohio, they shared a bill with Jack Benny, who, learning of their mania for golf, asked whether he could join Bing and Al in a game. They had already made arrangements at the Scioto Country Club (where Jack Nicklaus learned to play) and so changed their reservation to a threesome, arriving early the next morning in their plus fours. After three or four holes, Bing hit his ball over a fence into a cow pasture. “That’s a new ball,” Bing complained, and climbed over the fence to get it. 44 As he searched the pasture, Al and Jack heard a frightful bellowing and turned to see a mammoth black bull galloping toward Bing. As they yelled warnings, Bing took off like buckshot, barely making it over the fence in time. Shaken, they laughed it off, as they tended to do with most things.
The Rhythm Boys usually managed to look good onstage in their blue blazers and white flannels. Harry stood five foot six but usually sat at the piano; Bing was five nine and Al five ten. Variety recognized them as a potential hit “with the younger generation, particularly the flaps [girls]” 45 but was less pleased with the material. Robert Landry, who had written the first review of Bing and Al in San Francisco and was now reporting from New York, saw “ample room for improvement” in the fifteen-minute act: “Little too much of sameness about the horseplay. More rhythm and melody and less slamming of the music rack suggested.” With “elimination and improvements,” he thought, they would be “a consistent zowie.” 46 They ignored the advice, preferring to rack up hilarity on- and offstage.
Bing’s favorite city on tour was Chicago, where the trio played one week in September and another in November. As he grew friendly with Louis Armstrong, they began to inspire each other. Bing had learned much from Louis about style, spontaneity, time, and feeling. Armstrong was the fount from which Bing’s swinging and irreverent but emotional approach to song developed. Louis returned the admiration, picking up on Bing’s timbre and his way with ballads, which he soon added to his repertoire. Occasionally Louis even paid Bing homage by covering his songs or inserting a telling mordent. Writing in the 1960s to a friend, he discussed Bing at length: “Shortly after I witnessed my first hearing of Bing’s singing, he started making records with his Trio and different bands. Then, later, by himself. And that did settle it. There were just as many colored people ‘buying air,’ raving over Bing’s recordings, as much as anybody else. The chicks (gals) were justa swooning and screaming when Bing would sing…. The man was a Natural Genius the day he was born. Ever since Bing first opened his mouth, he was the Boss of All Singers and Still is.” 47
One night Armstrong took Charlie Carpenter, his valet and subsequently a lyricist (“You Can Depend on Me”) and Earl Hines’s manager, to the Grand Terrace Ballroom, which stayed open until 4:30 A.M. The Rhythm Boys stopped by at 2:00, after finishing their own gig. Charlie was too young to drink but marveled at Bing’s thirst. When he ran into Bing thirty years later on a television soundstage, he told him, “I haven’t seen you since 1928, Bing, but I still remember you were tore up.” Bing laughed and said, “I probably was because in those days I was really putting it away.” 48 He was consuming more than liquor.
Louis’s influence on Bing extended to his love of marijuana, which he alternately called mezz (after Mezz Mezzrow), gage, pot, or muggles. Bing didn’t develop the lifelong appetite for it that Louis did, but he enjoyed it in the early days — it was legal — and, like Louis, surprised interviewers in the 1960s and 1970s by suggesting it be decriminalized, to set it apart from more harmful and addictive drugs. Bing’s eldest son, Gary, argued that pot had a lasting effect on his father’s style: “If you look at the way he sang and the way he walked and talked, you could make a pretty good case for somebody who was loaded. He said to me one time when he was really mad, ranting and raving about my heavy drinking, he said, ‘Oh, that fucking booze. It killed your mother. Why don’t you just smoke shit?’ That was all he said but there were other times when marijuana was mentioned and he’d get a smile on his face. He’d kind of think about it and there’d be that little smile.” 49
Gary’s theory is hardly the strangest explanation of Bing’s preternatural cool, which in the early years of his career suggested indifference rather than the composure for which he became famous. It was as if he had not fully committed himself to the idea of making himself a success. He made no attempt to hide his stumbling inconsistency, except in letters home, which were often accompanied by mementos and gifts. His younger brother, Bob, finishing high school, received regular updates on Bing’s fortunes: “He’d write me quite often, tell me about the cities he played and what was happening in the orchestra. He sent me records of the original Dorsey brothers band and a lot of jazz things with Frankie Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke and some of the great musicians; a lot of Louie Armstrong, that was one of his favorites. Told me at one time, ‘I’m sending you a tennis racket and a whole tennis outfit. I want you to learn how to play tennis because that’s a great way to meet people.’And he sent me from Saks Fifth Avenue a very expensive racket and beautiful sweater and the shoes and the whole thing and a book of instructions by Bill Tilden.” 50
About that time, Bing posed — uncharacteristically natty — for an eight-by-ten sepia portrait, his hands tucked into the pockets of a double-breasted jacket, with a handkerchief peaking from the breast pocket, and his tie carefully arranged with a dimple below the knot. His eyes are luminous and his hair thinning; a rakish, ready smile is crowned by an exactingly trimmed mustache. In his caption on a copy he sent his brother Ted, Bing wrote, “brush by Fuller.” His inscription also included a question without a question mark: “Am I too suave or sveldt.” 51
He was neither when he finished the November 1928 week in Chicago. During that visit Bing’s romance with Peggy Bernier blossomed, though they were not especially committed to each other. A series of beaux awaited Peggy at the stage door. To Bing, the Good News cast was a chicken coop and he was the fox. He dated one of Peggy’s two roommates and tried to get the other on the phone. But Dixie Carroll, who turned seventeen the day before the Rhythm Boys opened at the State-Lake Theater, had heard plenty about Bing’s reputation and refused his call. (A year later in Hollywood, she would take the name Dixie Lee and meet Bing face-to-face for the first time.) Still, Bing could not bear to part with Peggy, a playmate who could hold her liquor better than he, and when Harry and Al took the train for the next gig, in Rockford, Illinois, he promised to leave the next day and get there on time. After a serious night of saloon-hopping, Peggy poured him onto a train. Bing passed out and slept the distance, but it did him no good; he was in such bad shape when the train pulled in, the police hauled him to jail and kept him overnight, refusing to let him use the phone.
Harry and Al panicked. They went onstage as a duo for two shows, kibitzing their way through comedy numbers and haphazardly filling in Bing’s part. “We were sure something awful happened to Bing,” Al said, “maybe an accident.” 52 After the second show they called the hotel, and Bing answered, groggy and chagrined as he admitted why he had not been able to call them. They took revenge by asking an Irish actor to impersonate the theater manager. The actor marched up to Bing’s room and accused him of betraying his partners and breaching his contract. Bing abjectly apologized, asking the manager not to punish the other two for his transgressions, until Al
and Harry could take no more and stopped the charade. He accepted the prank, smiling in relief.
While his Rhythm Boys cavorted through the Midwest, Whiteman enjoyed a series of triumphs in the East, including a Carnegie Hall celebration of his tenth year in New York. On the same September day that Whiteman recorded a garish medley of Christmas carols, among them “Silent Night” (a song that would one day become a Crosby annuity), an apoplectic theater manager in Toledo brought down the curtain on the Rhythm Boys in retaliation for what he considered a vulgar joke: “Say, Harry, do you know how to cure a horse from frothing at the mouth?” “Why no, Bing, how do you cure a horse from frothing at the mouth?” “Well, Harry, you teaches him to spit.” 53 The boys were happier when they were in New York, and the band made better records when they were around.
One of them is Challis’s arrangement of Willard Robison’s faux-rural hymn, “’Taint So, Honey, Taint So,” the first record ever to begin with the singer entering before the band, which comes in a millisecond later. It was a startling thing to do, and a rumor grew that Bing was unable to pitch the correct note until the tenth take, when Challis had to prompt him with a pitch pipe. Challis denied the whole story: “I wanted to start off with a vocal, just a prank sort of, so I gave him the note he starts on. I think Paul beat off, or I did, well, anyway, he came right in and sang it. No problems or anything. And no problems with changes of key. He had a wonderful ear.” 54 “’Taint So” is also notable for a balky bassoon solo by Trumbauer and dark Venuti-influenced strings behind Bing’s vocal.