by Gary Giddins
Of all the world’s famous singers
That I have ever seen
On the movie screen,
Of all the world’s famous singers
That I have ever seen
On the movie screen,
Lawrence Tibbett and Nelson Eddy,
Donald Novis and Morton Downey,
Kenny Baker and Rudy Vallée,
But the crooning prodigy is Bing Crosby.
Bing has a way of singing
With his very heart and soul,
Which captivates the world.
His millions of listeners never fail to rejoice
At his golden voice.
They love to hear his la-da-de-da [whistles]
So sweetly and with such harmony
Thrilling the world with his melody.
Mention must be made of Bing’s romantic life,
Centered on his wife.
As lovely as the soft sylphs of poetic dreams
Her smile is like the moonbeams.
A former star, we know she can sing.
But now her voice she has reserved
for her sons and Bing.
So, so happy must be Bing Crosby
That he married a beauty like Dixie Lee.
I wonder if you heard him singing that song
“May I (be the only one to say I)?”
And yet I’m wondering if you heard again,
“(Every time it rains, it rains) Pennies from Heaven”?
But “Love Thy Neighbor” was the most thrilling song,
And “Git Along, Little Dogies, Git Along.”
So sweetly and with such harmony
Thrilling the world with his melody.
Bing has a most interesting personality
Beloved universally.
He has two private horses, Double Trouble and Ligaroti,
Pipe smoking is his hobby.
He has a queer eccentricity —
Takes off his hat very infrequently.
So one and all, let’s unanimously
Shout three cheers for this golden voice prodigy. 67
21
PUBLIC RELATIONS
Where most of the Hollywood stars look upon personal publicity as the lifeblood of their business, stooping to inane invention and trickery to get it, Bing thumbs his nose at it…. [He] is unco-operative because he just doesn’t give a damn.
—H. Allen Smith, Life in a Putty Knife Factory (1943) 1
Bing’s role as the Technological Man reflected his introduction to the world of music and entertainment; much as Louis Armstrong’s career reflected his reverse initiation in New Orleans’s honky-tonks. For Bing, the passkey had been the Edison gramophone his father brought home when he was three. It introduced him to a procession of performers — concurrently and without prejudice — that included Irish tenors, Jewish vaudevillians, Sousa marching bands, barbershop quartets, jazz bands, and dance bands. Canned music was unknown to the young Louis, who encountered no less varied a musical banquet— from blues, rags, and minstrelsy to opera, quadrilles, and marches — in the flesh, at picnics and funerals and on the street. When Louis was able to purchase his first wind-up phonograph, as a teenager, his favorites included Caruso and John McCormack, whom he valued for his “beautiful phrasing.” 2
As Bing’s interest in music matured, he continued to find inspiration in the recordings he and Al Rinker memorized and copied. The Musicaladers were, in effect, a garage band — school kids emulating the popular music of the day. But Louis served a true apprenticeship with the very giants he venerated, learning their music and customs firsthand, working alongside experienced men who encouraged his every step. Louis established records as the definitive texts for a new art (his glorious bands, the Hot Five and Hot Seven, existed only to record), yet music remained for him a social experience that required an audience to complete the circle. Bing established all-time statistics with his extended stay at the Paramount Theater, yet music remained for him a skill best realized through mechanical reproduction. After the war, when he made several appearances on Bing’s radio show, Louis played to the audience while Bing played to Louis.
Cocooning himself in technology at the same time he gamboled at sporting events and other public occasions, Bing was magically everywhere and nowhere, a perfect candidate for the ministrations of publicists charged with the assignment of riffing at length on what everybody already knew. The Bing that Paramount’s publicity office spoon-fed the media was, overall, close enough to the truth to give all involved a clean conscience. The releases were written in a simple, mirthful, self-satisfied style that reinvented this most willfully independent of men as a blend of Tom Sawyer, Ragged Dick, Abe Lincoln, and Will Rogers — untouchably appealing, not unlike the folkloric hero of Roaring Lion’s calypso. 3
It has been written that the old studio demagogues spied on their screenwriters, listening for the sound of typing to make certain no one was dawdling. If they didn’t bother checking the cubicles where their public-relations men worked, it was because a cluster of busier writers never lived. Day after day, studio publicists hammered out reams of copy about the company’s principal assets, its stars, much of it laughably untrue. Who had time to check facts? And what star wanted to be pestered by facts? Actors with made-up names and made-up biographies were content to let the studio’s press office reinvent them as it pleased.
The fictionalizing was often essential. The faintest whiff of moral turpitude could be ruinous, grounds to break a contract, although exceptions were made for stars who shone brightly at the box office. In the event of a problem too big for the publicists to hide, a patsy might have to take a fall. Hirelings could always be found to accept the blame for reckless accidents or acquiesce to sham marriages. Most stars, however, required no cover beyond the blizzard of press releases that found their way, virtually unchanged, into newspapers and magazines.
The power and arrogance of publicists was no secret. Hollywood lampooned them mercilessly, invariably portraying them as unscrupulous, ruthless, alcoholic, and utterly indifferent to the desires of the lost souls consigned to their unctuous hands. Onscreen, Lee Tracy (once cited by Bing as a favorite film actor) incarnated the role in Bombshell; Lionel Stander made it nastier in A Star Is Born. In Bing’s She Loves Me Not the press flack is sleazier than the murderers. But the contempt of their associates by no means diminished the press agents’ hold on the public’s credulity. They were abetted by entertainment editors who cheerfully accommodated them, sometimes appending a reporter’s byline to a standard press release. Since Bing’s providential life made for a most seductive serial, Paramount flacks were obliged constantly to rehash it — spinning their own variations. Bing was of little help to them. He shunned invasions of his personal life.
He faced a Jesuitical conundrum: how to remain one of the sheep when everyone persists in treating you like the shepherd; how to keep that unruly mistress fame in her place. Success was a beautiful stranger who compromises a perfect evening by demanding unqualified love. Bing recognized that fans who loved him and expected the same in return were best handled from a distance. Yet even as he resisted public appearances, he assiduously responded to admirers, one at a time. As early as Cremo he made a point of answering his mail, dictating brief and businesslike responses. Several of his fan correspondences went on for years, leading to encounters and friendships. He was godfather to the child of at least one longtime letter writer. 4
He blew hot and cold in the same way with colleagues. “Out here, all people want to do is to party and socialize,” he told Cork O’Keefe in the late 1930s. “It got so I’d meet someone on the set for the first time, and next thing they’d be standing on my doorstep with a bunch of friends, expecting to be invited in and entertained. So my home’s off-limits to everyone.” 5 Yet his loyalties were absolute. “If you were his friend, he was a friend till the end,” insisted Gary Stevens. “Look at all the song publishers he practically supported, like Rocco Vocco.” 6 Vocco had be
friended Bing in the Whiteman era, on occasion putting him to bed after a night’s carousing; he could always call on Bing and ask him to debut a song on KMH. Bing was accessible; he answered his own phone. What he did not do very often was entertain guests — especially after 1939.
It was different in the mid-thirties, when Dixie occasionally instigated parties, though she, too, had second thoughts. After the night Joe Venuti came to dinner, she encouraged Bing to entertain his more colorful friends away from home. She had just purchased dining-room chairs with wood-framed wicker backs. Several drinks into the evening, Joe bet Bing he could butt his head through the wicker. Bing anted up, double or nothing, until Joe destroyed every chair, convulsing Bing and enraging Dixie, who banished them to the veranda till morning.
A more serious reason for keeping the world at bay was the fear of kidnappers, magnified by the police, who first warned the Crosbys of a plot before Gary was a year old. Three days after he had been cautioned, Bing obtained a permit to carry a gun, as did Ev; they were sworn in as deputy sheriffs. The publicity turned sour two years later when Bing was stopped for speeding, and the traffic cop noticed his revolver. Bing had forgotten the permit and had to explain himself at the Hollywood police station before he was allowed to continue on to Paramount. He began to realize that some threats were nothing more than unfounded rumors generated by publicity-seekers among the police or at the FBI. Yet if his sons were never endangered, they were nonetheless victimized. Obsessed with their safety, Bing hired bodyguards and imposed strict curfews. His attempt to raise them as regular kids was undermined by his constraining protectiveness.
Every few months, before a new Crosby film premiered, the newspapers and fan magazines published interviews, stories, even articles by Bing himself. Almost all were drawn from publicity releases. The result was fairly astonishing: the illusion that Bing was ubiquitous and approachable, when in fact he was harder to pin down for an interview than perhaps any other star of his stature. He was so pervasive on records and radio that his fans seemed not to notice his long absence from the stage. Bing liked to explain his aversion to live performance by insisting he was not a great entertainer, like Jolson or Fields. All his life, no matter how high his star rose, a part of him remained a fan with his nose pressed against the glass of the very business he ruled. The surest way to get his cold shoulder was to approach him with starry eyes.
The publicity assault had begun early. College Humor had just opened and Too Much Harmony was before the cameras when the studio issued its five-page opus, “The Life Story of Bing Crosby Written by Himself.” 7 The best that can be said of the effort is that it reverses the venerable literary tradition in which fictional characters — from Robinson Crusoe to Huckleberry Finn — are made to seem real; here, without any morsal of literary distinction, a real person is made to seem fictional. “I love to sing,” it commences, “and I can thank my lucky stars that other people like to hear me!” It gets worse, hitting notes that resonated for many years: “I’m one of those old-time bathroom baritones (since dignified by the title ‘Crooner’) and, in or out of the bathtub, Brother, I sing!”
Bing’s days as a scalawag were recent enough to require acknowledgment: “I don’t think a crazier guy ever lived than the Bing Crosby who sang at the Cocoanut Grove. Irresponsible? Say, I was so busy having a good time that I didn’t know what responsibility was.” Nor could the growth on his vocal cords be ignored, although he claims not to understand (“Honestly!”) the “husky quaver” it yields. He calls Russ Columbo “a grand entertainer” and says they used to imitate each other (that one must have nettled Bing when he read it). In the “gay dog” days, he says, he broke contracts “without realizing what I was doing and without meaning to harm anyone intentionally.” 8 Excerpted or whole, this stuff was widely published.
The mock Bing concedes he can’t tell some things, so he asks Dixie Lee — “the wife, who has been putting up with me for a long time” — to continue. She also sighs a few enduring ditties, adding to a portrait of likable incorrigibility. His clothes: he “always looks as though he’s been pulled out of the scrap bag.” His innocence: “Bing is the most naive person in the world except Dick Arlen.” His shyness: “When he was courting me, he was tongue-tied most of the time — like an awestruck little boy.” His modesty: “He claims to be the laziest man in the world — and yet he works his head off.” His willfulness: “We were having a party one night. At ten, Bing got up from his chair, said, ‘Good night, have a good time.’ With an admonition to me to carry on, he went to bed.” His genuineness: “Today he’s quite the same sort of person that he appears in the films — perhaps that’s why he’s so popular!” 9
Rarely did Bing take the trouble to correct errors Paramount promulgated, as he did with the 1934 press release that insisted his son was “not named after Gary Cooper. Bing and Dixie just liked the name” or the canard that found him “shouting ‘bing’ louder than any kid in the neighborhood while playing cowboy in Washington.” 10 It was usually too late. If one cycle of newspapers circulated a tale, the next repeated it. NBC distributed a biographical three-pager in the summer of 1939, in which nearly every line conveys misinformation. 11 Paramount releases made the malarkey more credible with touches of veracity — the weird clothing, whistling, fishing, self-deprecation, golf, pipe smoking. Some handouts were deemed so effective that the studio recycled them. The one that began “I love to sing” was updated with the title, “Some Sad Words Set to Gay Music,” adding a paragraph about his recent pictures while omitting the passages about Russ Columbo, the husky quaver, and Dixie’s observations. It ends: “I seem to be headed for success and I’m glad that it has come to me at this time, when I am no longer a gay dog, but a business man with a frog in his throat.” 12
By 1935 Crosby press releases had grown more subtle, less exclamatory. The gurus most responsible for the fabricated Bing were publicity men Ralph Huston and Dave Keene, who worked under Huston and often adopted Bing’s byline. “Say It with Music: Bing Crosby’s Life Story as Told to Dave Keene” 13 was initially written in the third person (“If Bing Crosby hadn’t once tried to earn himself a few dollars by working as a lumberman…”), 14 then adapted as a memoir (“If I hadn’t once tried to earn a few bucks for myself by being a lumberman…”). In yet another draft Keene took a completely new tack, beginning, “The most important thing in any man’s life is a woman. I’ve been favored above most men….” 15 It continues with hymns in praise of Bing’s mother, Mildred Bailey, Dixie, and Broadway comedienne Elsie Janis, who, the release claims, was the most important woman in Bing’s life after mother and wife because she prodded him to leave the Rhythm Boys — although “Barris was really the outstanding singer of the bunch. Al and I just made up the harmony.” 16 (Bing may have known Janis, but he never publicly spoke of her.) 17 Keene’s chronicle, a dozen pages parsed into five chapters, even revamped Bing’s ancestors, making them Indian fighters as well as sea captains. Bing’s dad was handsomely promoted: “Old Harry had a pickle factory.”
By 1936 most of the elements in the Crosby legend were locked into place and references to his life as a gay dog disappeared. It is impossible not to love the character stitched together in Paramount’s press office — generous, naive, humorous, happy, modest, unpretentious, pleasingly eccentric, devoted to family, bemused by good fortune. “Screen success hasn’t altered his care-free good nature, his carelessness, nor his innate laziness,” Ralph Huston enthused. “The only thing Bing resents is invasion of the privacy of his home. In public, he is perfectly willing to be a public figure. At home, like Garbo, he ‘wants to be alone.’” 18
By 1938 the releases were filled with tales of golf and the track and of his investments. For a few years he took a strong interest in prizefighting, buying the contract of heavyweight Georgie Turner and, more successfully, a half interest in Tacoma’s Freddie Steele, who fought his way to middleweight champion. Turning his attention to another kind of boxer, he paid $1,500 for Gunda of
Barmere (Bing renamed her Venus), whose stock inspired him to dabble in a commercial breeding kennel and enter his dogs in shows. His other investments included real estate and oil wells; an all-girl baseball team, the Croonerettes; Canadian gold mines; a majority share of Select Music Publishing Co.; and an actor’s agency with a chancy roster: actresses Mary Carlisle and Genevieve Tobin, soprano Josephine Tuminia, songwriters John Burke and Arthur Johnston, and Dixie. His diverse interests were managed by Bing Crosby, Inc., the “very legal and secure” (as a finicky Paramount flack put it) 19 family-run business created as an umbrella for his ever growing assets. Bing was president, Everett and Larry chief officers, and old Harry the bookkeeper of record.
Much was made of Bing’s refusal to accept star billing, his insistence on crediting his success to luck and “swell friends” 20 (“as for acting, Bing doesn’t know the meaning of the word”), 21 his imperturbable “naturalness and nonchalance.” 22 He was often coupled with Eddie Cantor as one of Hollywood’s proudest fathers. Not all Paramount flacks read each other’s copy, though; as late as 1938 a newcomer wrote, “There’s no romance how he happened to become ‘Bing.’ He just shouted ‘Bing! Bing!’ louder and oftener than the other kids who played cops and robbers.” 23