Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  Inasmuch as the studio has expressed a desire to make a picture covering my career, I see how we can mutually profit in the following manner. Before the articles in Collier’s are released, Jones proposes to get a title okayed by the company. After the story appears there is no reason why it can’t be sold to Paramount for $15,000 or even $20,000, as a starring vehicle for me, and I can urge its purchase…. I figure if [Grover] could take this material you are writing and revise and rewrite to suit his purposes, release it to Collier’s, withholding, of course, picture and book rights, we would be in a much better position to collect on the latter two. Of course, any money coming to me I would assign to you. But for the business angle of the whole thing, I should appear. This deal with Collier’s is already set, so your chance is on picture and book rights, where I have every reasonable belief you would be successful.

  I have no clear recollection of the interesting events prior to my going into show business and naturally rely on your material to supply these. What has happened in the meantime he and I can concoct. He plans the whole thing in story form, not an article, and in real down-to-earth fashion, not the stilted biographical things that have appeared in the various film and radio magazines.

  I would like to try and arrange the thing so some of the professional credit redounds to you, in addition to the financial gain for yourself if everything works out as planned.

  What he is interested in chiefly are the minor incidents that happened around Spokane, and in school, that are real and interesting. These to be fictionized and colored a bit, and woven into a good tight story that avoids the cut and dried and makes good reading. The only parts of the yarn that need to be factual are the high points, such as marriage, the children, places of employment etc. 55

  The film and the article fell through — Collier’s instead published “The Kid from Spokane” by Quentin Reynolds 56 — but the book took on a life of its own, as Ted composed first drafts and mailed them to Larry, who submitted them to Bing and returned the revised pages to Ted. 57 “I am mailing you 7 chapters of the book as we have finally completed them,” Larry wrote Ted in April 1935, the month the Quentin Reynolds story ran. 58 “Bing has just finished one more — so I am having to keep after him to get them out.” 59 Bing had recently wrapped Misissippi and, Larry confided, “he is tired of everything but horses & golf.” 60 Yet somehow he found the energy to add the book to his regimen of obligations.

  While the book progressed, Ted continued to pitch various enterprises, involving mining, medicine, and other projects for which he requested capital. Larry wrote him that Bing would be unable to underwrite them, as “his surplus money” was invested in Pennies from Heaven. 61 When Ted asked Bing to do a broadcast endorsing one venture, Larry explained that even if Bing donated his time, the cost of the orchestra and the station made it impractical. Ted put most of his energy into songwriting and a singer named Marion Boyle. He mailed a slew of songs to Larry, along with a stream of advice: “The enclosed ‘Don’t Look Behind You’ is, I think, a natural, for a picture…. Of the Pennies from Heaven numbers I liked, ‘So Do I’ and ‘Have a Heart’… Saw Sailor Beware the other night — very punk. Good thing Bing didn’t get stuck to do that…. If a Mrs. Brosius calls to see you about some tunes she has, use your judgment.” 62

  Larry submitted Ted’s songs to Bing’s publishing company, Select; when they were returned, Ted suggested other publishers and asked Larry whether Bing would sing one on the air. Their father told Ted that Bing had tried to fit one into a broadcast but was stopped by the sponsor. Ted persevered: “Any chance of my writing a story for a picture for him? Advise and will go to work.” 63 Larry explained that his ideas were not powerful enough to “supplant what the writers on salary can turn out.” 64 Months later Ted made demos of his own songs, and Larry sent them to Select’s president, George Joy, who wrote back, “I went over those records of your brother Ted’s songs, and there are a couple among them that sound pretty fair, but… we’ve got to get outstanding material; we cannot take just ordinary songs because of the opposition we are up against.” He mentioned Berlin, Gershwin, and Porter and concluded, “Pass this along to Ted and tell him that I do hope one of these days we can get together with him on a song of his.” 65

  Larry made a deal to syndicate the book in London, payment to be made when the finished manuscript was delivered, and had a rough draft printed for Bing’s approval. While Ted eagerly waited for the English check, Bing lingered over two chapters. Larry assured him, “Bing is now going over the book — & has made some good changes. I have plenty offers — & hope to have good news soon.” 66 With Collier’s out of the picture, Larry tried the Saturday Evening Post, the weekly that sixteen years later enjoyed the best sales figures in its history serializing Bing’s Call Me Lucky. For now, it preferred to commission an original Bing story, by humorist H. Allen Smith. In January 1937 Harry wrote Ted, “Flash: Believe it or not, Bing finished the last chapter of the story the other day and it’s been mailed ….” 67 Proofs were rushed to Ted.

  By March copies of Bing were available in two editions. Larry and Ted had misguidedly decided to publish and distribute it themselves, through the Bolton Printing Company. They produced a paperback version that Larry sold virtually at cost, for a dollar, through direct mail; the profit margin was too small to permit anything else. A two-dollar edition was bound in blue felt, with just the title, Bing, embossed in gold on the cover. They soon learned the vagaries of vanity publishing. “Response to cloth slow, but expect more when publicity breaks,” Larry wrote Ted. 68 A department store in Spokane bought a hundred copies for a window display. By April they knew the book had flopped. “Even in my most conservative moments,” Larry confessed, “I would have gambled the 100 copies wouldn’t last there over a week.” 69 They sold no more than a hundred copies at the Los Angeles theater showing Bing’s latest film, Waikiki Wedding. “There isn’t enough margin to place it in bookstores until the cost is cut in half on the second run,” concluded Larry. “Besides they want a three-month consignment which is tough to carry.” 70 He cautioned Ted not to buy a ranch.

  They sold a total of 400 copies in the first weeks, mostly through fan mail, yet Larry put on a show for a reporter from England’s Gramophone, who visited Crosby, Inc.’s three-story office building at 9028—30 Sunset Boulevard. He asked Larry if he thought fans would buy the book. “Larry led me to another part of the office to see the organization which deals with Bing’s fan mail. I questioned the success of this project no longer. Bing’s fan mail arrives in sacks from every part of the world.” 71 An article in Look that year reported the number of letters as 10,000 per month. 72 Yet the books did not move. Larry could not distribute them to stores or afford the advertising that would have alerted fans who bought every magazine with Bing’s picture on the cover. In the end, he asked Kraft and Paramount to accept the books as premiums: “It should make as good a theater give-away as crockery and the other junk they put out on grocery nights.” 73 Paramount enclosed the book in Double or Nothing press packages in September, with the suggestion that theaters use it as an inducement. Decca mailed inserts, offering the book to dealers at a 25 percent discount.

  Reviewers, not surprisingly, ignored it. The Crosbys had produced a bewildering puree of fact and fancy, crammed with conversation, much of it ludicrous. Written in the style of a novel for adolescents (Tom Swift in Hollywood), Bing is boy’s life adventure, tracking the hero with the idiom’s requisite luck-and-pluck sentimentality, bolstered with a decent selection of family pictures. H. Allen Smith wrote, “Bing must love [his brothers] deeply to have ever permitted its publication.” 74 In his preface of four sentences, Bing appears to concur. He says he can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in his biography, “but my brothers have long importuned me for permission to write it.” He refers to their efforts as “sophomoric” yet claims that “all incidents are true.” 75 Larry and Ted more cautiously added to the dedication page (“with fond recollections to Mothe
r and Bing”) a disclaimer: “For obvious reasons, some of the names and places are fictitious.” 76 A truth rings through nonetheless, echoed by Smith: “Bing’s career remains to me an American epic because it is the reverse of the traditional success story” — he violates the dicta of every schoolmarm, “and look at him!” 77

  “I was just beginning to dust off a few daydreams concerning a new house and one or two other things; so I will just put them back on the shelf,” Ted wrote Larry. 78 Bing, realizing how little the project netted his brother, enabled Ted to finance a house that summer. But even after Ted received a promotion at Washington Water Power, he continued to dispatch songs, ideas, and candidates for stardom to Los Angeles. At Bing’s second annual golf tournament in January 1938, Bing asked Roy Moe, the professional at Spokane’s leading country club, if he could purchase a membership for his brother. Moe promised to raise the subject with the board. A board member wrote Bing that Ted would be welcome — “he is very well thought of” 79 — and that dues were $221. Bing wrote on the bottom of the letter, “Send check for $221.00. Advise Ted — send me bill for monthly dues — direct from club if necessary.” 80

  Ted had not been the only family member circling the golden trough in 1937. Bing’s childhood hero, Uncle George Harrigan, had come back into the picture, writing to the office with hard-luck tales. Bing sent him $500, to the consternation of his father. Kate’s sister, Annie, had died, and the widower, Ed Walsh, married the nurse who had cared for her. During their honeymoon the Walshes visited Uncle George and were charmed by George’s daughter, Marion, whom they brought to Los Angeles. The sudden appearance of all these relatives incensed the usually easy Harry. “[Marion] is about the biggest fool I ever saw,” he griped to Ted. “Then old Walsh gets Mr. Wyatt [Dixie’s dad] to take her out to Bing’s house, and she moved in on them for about two weeks, till they left, this was without an invitation. Oh was Mother and I mad.” 81 Bing and Dixie, however, enjoyed Marion’s company.

  The familial jockeying for favor peaked at Christmastime 1936. “Bing did not send checks to anyone this year, only presents, but that old woman (your uncle George Harrigan) wrote one of his sob letters to Bing,” Harry wrote Ted. George had wanted to attend a football game, Harry howled, “and dam if Bing didn’t send him a check for $100 — and 4 tickets to the game. I tried every way to stop it but to no avail. Bing and Dixie think George and Marion are tops. That dam liar and double crosser, I hate her. When she was here, she did not go see anyone, but stayed at Bing’s all the time drinking with Dixie.” 82

  Harry was pleased, however, that Kate had taken to calling him Caliban, “because I like to run around with young folks — ain’t that mean though?” 83 Harry and Kate were spending increasing hours at the races. One day they took home $150. “Now Mother is having lots of Masses said for you all,” Harry reported. 84

  Bing’s favorite sister, Mary Rose, was having a harder time of it, raising her infant daughter while suffering from a thyroid condition (“I expect before long people will be mistaking me for Mae West”). 85 Her marriage was crumbling, and she studied shorthand to compensate for her husband’s unemployment (“the louse”) while living on a stipend from Bing’s office — barely enough, she complained, “to pay my board and schooling and keep the kid and I in Pants.” She closed the same letter, “Dear me, if I’m not just like Dixie — always having to figure out how to save a nickel here and there.” 86 Harry and Kate and all the siblings, except for the independent and happily married Catherine (Kay), seemed to have their eyes on the till. “Bing has put so much money into the Del Mar Race track, and gambling on horses,” Harry fretted, “that we are having a time holding him down, in order that he will have enough left to pay the Income Tax.” 87

  There were no real familial fissures, however, until 1944, when Bing invited Ted to join him in Los Angeles as a publicist for Del Mar, and Ted prepared a revised edition of his and Larry’s long-forgotten book. The ensuing feud, which involved stock certificates, theft, Bing’s divestment of his interests in Del Mar, and the book itself, would last nearly twenty years and rupture forever the relationship between Ted and his unforgiving parents. Yet no one could have imagined such a storm in the fall of 1937, when the Crosbys reunited in Ted’s backyard for a gala homecoming befitting Spokane’s prodigal son.

  22

  HOMECOMING

  The interesting part of Bing to me is that he likes to be with jockeys, with millionaires, with beach boys and with caddies. He likes colorful people; he likes people who are amusing and aren’t phonies. He’s an unphony man. He’s so distant, but he’s a very genuine man.

  — Johnny Mercer (1974) 1

  As trying as the book experience must have been throughout 1937, Larry looked beyond it to help craft one of the most pleasing publicity events of Bing’s career, his official return to his hometown — twelve years to the month after he and Rinker drove off in their Tin Lizzy. Spokane had made overtures as far back as 1932, when hundreds of people signed a valentine, placed on display at a theater showing one of his Sennett shorts and then mailed to Bing in care of the New York Paramount. By 1937 he contemplated taking Kraft Music Hall on the road. When his old friend Mike Pecarovich, Gonzaga’s football coach, visited him in Hollywood, Bing pressed him with questions about summer training and said he might attend the September game between Gonzaga and Washington State, might even stay a week and do the show up there.

  Pecarovich reported the conversation, and Gonzaga responded with alacrity, offering Bing an honorary doctorate, the only one he would ever accept. The timing was perfect, as his visit would coincide with the university’s fiftieth anniversary, its jubilee. Cal Kuhl and Kraft were delighted with the idea. Bing was committed to raising money for Gonzaga, a project that occupied much of his attention over the next forty years. He took the matter in hand and dictated a letter, which Larry amended with a few details before mailing to Bing’s revered disciplinarian, the Reverend Curtis J. Sharp. Bing told Sharp that the event would have to be in October and that he would bring a well-known actor who had graduated from a Jesuit school, perhaps Pat O’Brien, Edmund Lowe, Andy Devine, or Walter Connolly, plus a band and other performers. Kuhl wanted to reserve the last five minutes of the broadcast for the presentation of the degree, Bing noted, so he needed to know the precise particulars and timing of the ceremony.

  Paramount also got into the act. Bing wrote: “We are going to run a contest open to residents of the Pacific Northwest to select a boy and girl, both amateurs and both under twenty-one, to come to Hollywood for a screen test and possibly a part in a Paramount picture.” 2 Bing, Kuhl, and others would choose the winners after entrants had been narrowed to a group of finalists. He added: “For the Kraft show, it is not considered a good thing to charge admission, so we will probably have to broadcast from a point where only a couple of hundred people would be admitted. Later they propose to give a monster dance and entertainment at the Armory, using the Dorsey band for dancing, and with Burns and myself and other acts we should have enough to put on a pretty good show.” Bing offered to give two performances (“if not too strenuous”), “one for $1.10 which would admit everybody to the Armory or Auditorium and another for $10.00 a couple, for the people on Cannon Hill or those who think they can afford such a stiff tariff…. I’ll be pleased to hear from you with any suggestions you might have relative to the show itself as a medium of garnering some shekels for the school.” 3

  Sharp mailed him the Latin diploma and a tribute he wrote (along with citations for phrases he borrowed from Tennyson and Horace), which was to be read by the Reverend Leo Robinson, the president of Gonzaga. He enclosed an English translation of the diploma “for the less enlightened brothers in your troupe.” 4 Sharp assured Bing he was doing all he could to keep their plans from leaking to the press, per Bing’s request, adding in an aside that Pecarovich, to whom Bing had given a small bit in Waikiki Wedding, “is all agog about his part in your new picture Double or Nothing. Spokane certainly has had
him over the barrel, paddling him generously.” 5 Larry wrote the school’s president that “Bing would prefer to arrive quietly without any fanfare, as our first item is the Mass, and then a day of radio rehearsal and the program with which no festivities must interfere.” 6

  Larry went public in early August with the news that Bing would broadcast from Spokane and receive an honorary degree in music, causing much consternation at Gonzaga when the faculty realized that, not having a graduate school in music, the school could not confer such a doctorate. They changed it to doctor of philosophy, reasoning that philosophy was a staple of a Jesuit education, but Gonzaga did not graduate philosophers, either. The astute Sharp intended to correctly present Bing with a doctor of letters, yet the mistake was allowed to stand, by which time the press was so confused that the Spokesman-Review reported he would receive “the degree of doctor of philosophy in music.” 7