by Gary Giddins
More remarkably, Bing was acknowledged as the second-highest-paid actor at any of the Hollywood studios. 91 Paramount’s Claudette Colbert ranked first, at $426,944, followed by Bing, at $410,000, and freelancer Irene Dunne, at $405,222. They were the only three to top $400,000, though none ranked among the top ten 1938 box-office draws, according to the 1938 Quigley poll. Their incomes implied keen business sense and an autonomy that, in Bing’s case, was fortified by his predominance in all media. His stature differed from the others in another way. While Paramount took great care to find suitable properties for Colbert, a Crosby property was presold by virtue of his presence alone. He was unlikely to find himself in a film he himself would have regarded as a potential classic. He was equally unlikely to find himself in a flop.
24
CAPTAIN COURAGEOUS
He never came on like a star, at least to anybody I ever saw. I’ve seen great singers choke, ‘cause they’re with the best. And whenever you did something like that, if you blew it, he blew it right behind you and blamed it on himself—you know, “Let’s do another take, I fucked that up.” He always sang the harmony part when he worked with somebody, always made it as easy as possible. He was a pleasure to work with.
— Gary Crosby (1991) 1
On September 17, 1938, as Sing You Sinners rang box-office bells and “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (a duet with Connie Boswell) took turns crowning the hit parade, Bing, Dixie, and five-year-old Gary, along with Larry and his wife, Elaine, and twenty-four pieces of luggage, ascended the ramp of the SS Monarch for a three-week vacation in Bermuda. Bing’s next film, Paris Honeymoon, was already in the can, shot during the summer between the two Westwood Marching and Chowder Club shows. In December he would begin preliminary work on his self-produced East Side of Heaven. Clearly, Bing and Dixie needed some time together. If he spread himself any thinner, nothing would be left but the stuff of caricature: pipe, hat, and golf club.
The trip, which concluded with a pleasant detour to Chicago and a reunion with baby brother Bob and Bob’s new bride, proved a memorable jaunt that raised the family’s spirits. Bing spent his time golfing, fishing, shopping, and shooting home movies with a 16mm camera he had acquired a couple of years earlier. The Crosbys returned with healthy tans and thirteen additional pieces of luggage containing purchases made along the way, including British military-style khaki shorts for each member of the Kraft team. Trotter’s shorts, however, were a shiny blue; an NBC press release quoted Bing kidding him, “There just wasn’t enough of this kind of khaki in Bermuda to make a pair of shorts for you.” 2 Bing also brought Trotter a song to orchestrate, “Bermuda Buggy Ride,” though he never recorded it.
Out shopping alone, Bing had bought a bolt of green doeskin cloth to have a suit made for his friend Edmund Lowe. “How’s that for a nice green?” he asked Larry back at the cottage. “That’s swell, Bing,” Larry told him, “but it isn’t green. It’s pink, and a bad pink at that.” 3 Bing returned to the store to exchange it, ordering by name rather than by sight.
The home movies Bing shot in Bermuda suggest nothing in the way of familial strain. In addition to touristy scenic pans, his camera dotes on Gary, golfing and riding in a horse-drawn cart, and captures a beach party and a deep-sea fishing expedition. During the years that Bing made most of his home movies (1936—40), he captured much of the same footage as numberless other dads in the era before camcorders and digitization replaced small movie cameras, tripods, portable screens, splicing Moviolas, noisy projectors that burned holes in the film stock, and social gatherings to display the results. That summer, in 1938, Bing edited years of footage into reels, complete with title cards that usually invoked the South: “Bing Crosby Presents Four Sons of Dixie,” “The Sun Shines Bright on the Old Toluca Home,” “Home on the Range, Where the Dears and Elder Folk Play.” Filmed in Toluca or at Rancho Santa Fe, they display a young happy family indistinguishable from the one the public imagined.
In one sequence (Walt Disney’s Snow White was the rage that year), the three elder boys are elaborately costumed as dwarfs while Sue Carol’s daughter plays Snow White. Elsewhere, Bing can scarcely take the camera off the recently christened Linny, who lies on his stomach or reposes in a swing (the caption: “Swing It!”) while his three brothers hold hands and play, turning somersaults in a sandpit, romping with the white terrier, Cremo, and other Crosby dogs, among them a matronly Saint Bernard that might have modeled for Nana in Peter Pan. A shot of Gary embracing the three-year-old twins is captioned “Gary Holds a Pair of Threes.” Everyone looks sunny and pleased, especially Gary, who accompanies Bing fishing and riding; at four, he handles himself smartly on a pony, trotting toward the camera with no adult in view. The caption reads: “Another Crosby Learns About Horses (we hope).” At five, Gary dives and swims, under the tutelage of a trainer. The boys are surrounded by animals, including a goat and chickens in the backyard, and are as comfortable with them as if they lived on a farm. Dixie is introduced with the card “Momie Has Her Moments of Popularity,” but she does not show up often and when she does, she is seen in the company of servants, nurses, and friends. Her hair is dark now, her smile broad yet shy; she wears dark glasses and gloves and a suit. One reel is called “Dixie Lee Presents Stepping Out” and documents Linny as he walked for the first time, with the caption “First Steps to Freedom from Feminine Autocracy.”
The most frequently photographed friend is Andy Devine, with and without his son, fishing, mugging, comparing his own stomach with the bulk of the huge fish they’ve landed. Richard Arlen and Pat O’Brien and their daughters show up, as well as Edmund Lowe and Henry Fonda, Dixie’s friends (especially Kitty) and parents, and Bing’s: Harry in cap, cardigan, and tie; Kate in sweater and skirt, lifting Gary horizontally off the ground with take-charge brass. But the truly remarkable aspect of these private idylls is the authority of Bing, who is in front of the camera more often than behind it.
Bing’s physical exuberance and style were shortchanged by his Hollywood features. Everything he does in the private reels is carried off with poised expertise. He rides at Santa Anita and Del Mar, with cap and pipe; walks the Alaskan coast among dozens of walruses and sizes up the seals; swims like a seal himself and plays tennis with an energetic grace; looks up from a backgammon game or down at a croquet ball; fishes for marlin; golfs; runs in a relay and hops in a sack race; dances the hula with a dozen or so grass-skirted beauties from Waikiki Wedding. Whatever the activity, he is invariably in his element, and his presence of mind shines through each frame.
Wearing shorts and a rolled-up bandanna to keep the thinning locks from his eyes, he is barechested on the fishing barge and, with his paunchy midriff and fleshy hips, suggests nothing of the torso of Apollo. Yet he is obviously in great physical condition, in perpetual motion, though very cool, with a pipe or a cigar and a twinkle for the camera when it meets his eye. He is surrounded by a crew of professionals. They land dozens of fish — someone is always ready with a club to finish off the largest; the deck and hold are awash in blood. The other amateurs occasionally get help from the pros, but not Bing, who wears a harness and reels in one monster after another as if he had grown up an apprentice to Disko Troop in Captains Courageous. He measures one catch against himself — they are the same height — and kisses another square on the mouth. Waiting for a bite, he holds his rod in one hand and with the other elaborately conducts the crew, unknowing members of his imaginary orchestra. In Chaplin’s Limelight the old comic Calvero says, “That’s all any of us are — amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Only in that sense does Bing convey amateur status.
As hard as Bing worked in the late 1930s, he was not the absentee father he became during the war, when army shows, charity work, and guest appearances kept him traveling around the country. The movies he shot at home and in Bermuda were hardly the labors of an indifferent or dilettante parent; they capture a long, rosy interval before the dam bro
ke. If all happy families are alike, his was an ostensible paradigm. Signs of marital discord were few and confined. Dixie’s drinking was not yet oppressive. If Bing stepped out in this period, his philandering — evident during the war but little noted before — was too incidental and discreet to merit attention. 4 After eight years he and Dixie were evidently committed to each other. Two years later Bing would threaten divorce for the first (but not the last) time since Dixie had raised the issue six months after their wedding. In the interim the mortal sin came to roost among Bing’s siblings; four out of six (all but Larry and Kay) risked the wrath of God and Mother Crosby to divorce and remarry.
Everett separated from Naomi in 1936, though not until April 1938 did he sue for divorce, citing her drinking. He won custody of their daughter, Mary Sue, and a year later married light-opera singer Florence George, who was twenty-three; Bing featured her a few times on Kraft Music Hall. 5 Much later Ted also divorced and remarried. 6 Bing’s favorite sister, Mary Rose, divorced and remarried twice. 7 The first to mortgage his soul was the youngest, Bob, whose band was playing at Chicago’s Congress Hotel in 1938 when he met June Kuhn, a Sarah Lawrence student on Easter vacation. His first marriage, to Marie Grounitz, had lasted nearly four years, producing a daughter; letters suggest they parted over her involvement with a woman and initially planned to separate, not divorce. 8 His marriage to June got off to a terrifying start when she climaxed an argument by stabbing him in the back. Yet to the family’s astonishment, he chose not to revoke the marriage, which lasted fifty-four years, producing three boys and two girls. 9
To a proud, resolute Catholic like Kate, these marital changes bore consequences. While Harry figured that Marie had “no one to blame but herself” and left it at that, Kate lamented Bob’s fall from grace. 10 Indeed, she held that grievance against him and the rest of her apostate children all her life. In the eyes of the Catholic Church, divorce, unlike the “humanly reparable” sin of adultery, warrants damnation. 11 Kate gave her children a preview, taunting those who had fallen and threatening those who had not. Ted’s son, Howard, who never knew his grandmother, recalled, “I talked to Uncle Bob, I talked to Aunt Mary Rose, I talked to Aunt Kay, and I certainly talked to my dad, and they all said they felt no love for their mother at all. They were scared of her. As children, they respected her because she commanded a lot of fear. Now I don’t know how Uncle Bing or Uncle Everett or Uncle Larry felt because I never talked to them about it.” 12
Bing and Dixie were in Bermuda when Bob and June married in Spokane, on September 22. Before heading home, they stopped in Chicago to meet the bride and provide Jack Kapp with a chance to record the brothers for the first time. Bob had become a commercial entity in his own right, fronting one of the era’s most distinctive bands, the sole orchestral exponent of a music close to Bing’s heart, Dixieland. “I’m the only guy in the business who made it without talent,” Bob once remarked. 13 The musicians in his band would not have disagreed with him. An indifferent baritone who at best sounded like Bing and at worst did not, he became a bandleader through personality, good looks, and a famous name.
* * *
Bob had been picking cucumbers in Washington at twenty-five cents an hour when Bing told Anson Weeks, facetiously perhaps, that he had a younger brother who could sing. Hungry for a touch of Crosby magic, Weeks wired Bob an offer of $100 a week to join his dance band (Weeks’s girl singer was Dale Evans). Dad Crosby handed him the telegram, laughing, saying it had to be a joke, because Bob could not sing. “I know,” Bob told him, “but anything is better than picking cucumbers.” 14 He took the train to Los Angeles to borrow a tuxedo from Bing, who spent the next ten days preparing him with voice lessons. Bob crooned with Weeks and then with the Dorseys, making little professional headway.
Bob’s big chance came about when established bandleader Ben Pollack began devoting more energy to romancing and building the career of his singer, Doris Robbins, than to his orchestra, which boasted some of the finest musicians in the business. When he announced a long layoff in Los Angeles, the musicians stacked Pollack’s music library on his doorstep one night and drove east, eventually reorganizing in New York under the leadership of Pollack’s erstwhile musical director, Gil Rodin. Rodin was a talented leader behind the scenes, which is where he wanted to stay. The musicians formed a cooperative in 1935 and took their idea for a band to Rockwell-O’Keefe. Benny Goodman had just ushered in a new era at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, and Cork O’Keefe was intrigued by the idea of a collective in which the musicians, the leader, and his office held shares. Who did they have in mind as a leader? Rodin’s men wanted the great trombonist and singer Jack Teagarden, but Paul Whiteman had him bound under a five-year contract. O’Keefe asked them to consider three of his clients. They thought Bob Crosby — young, pleasant, connected — the most promising. The job called for him to stand out front, smile, sing, and make introductions.
He took the opportunity seriously, especially when the Roger & Gallet perfume company offered to sponsor the band on a New York radio show. “This, of course, can either be the makings of the younger brother, or perhaps complete anhilization [sic] of the younger crooner’s career,” Bob wrote Ted. “Am hitting the piano every day, and running scales up and down in an effort to strengthen my voice a little and hope to show some improvement before the big program.” 15 The first night he appeared with the band, Bob bought a baton. Bassist-composer Bob Haggart recalled, “He knew nothing about leading a band, knew nothing about music. He would beat off all these terrible tempos, and we’d take the baton away from him. [Drummer Ray] Bauduc and I would have to start the tempo the way we knew it was supposed to be.” 16
But the idea worked like a charm. Fans came to gawk at the new Crosby and stayed to enjoy his cordial demeanor and swinging band, which downplayed his singing in favor of stellar arrangements (by Haggart, Matty Matlock, Deane Kincaide) and solos (by Eddie Miller, Irving Fazola, Yank Lawson, Billy Butterfield, Joe Sullivan). Critic and producer Helen Oakley convinced Rodin to start a band within the band, an octet called the Bob Cats; inevitably, the tag stuck to all of Bob’s musicians. Their swinging variation on the New Orleans style was received as a tonic. Duke Ellington, no less, described Crosby’s Bob Cats as “a truly gut-bucket band with a strong blues influence.” 17
The jitterbugs were elated, though Bob felt they never accepted him as his own man. “They wanted to see what Bing’s kid brother looked like,” Haggart said, “and that was his cross to bear. His whole life he’s been crying about the girls who would come up and ask, How tall is Bing? A lot of guys didn’t want to work for him, but I felt a debt of gratitude because he mentioned my name, gave me all these plugs. In fact, he mentioned everybody in the band, and no other bandleader did that in those days. He wasn’t much of a singer and he knew it, so he did a lot of talking.” 18 Haggart, who over the years worked extensively with Bing, believed Bing was as ambivalent about Bob as the men in his band. “You know, he was never really proud of his kid brother,” he observed, tracing the problem to Bob’s inveterate gambling. Shortly before Bing and Dixie left for Bermuda, the orchestra drew crowds at Chicago’s Blackhawk Restaurant, which harbored a bookie joint on the top floor. Bob wagered himself heavily into debt (Haggart thought $8,000), and the hoods running it issued an ultimatum. “The next thing I know, Larry and Everett came out from California to straighten the thing out. And that kept happening. Bing wasn’t too fond of that.” 19
The ambivalence ran both ways. Publicly Bob often recounted the many things Bing did for him; privately he was known to grumble they were not enough. From Bob’s perspective, Bing had progressed from his baby-sitter to a well-traveled entertainer, with no stops between. Eleven years and thousands of miles separated them. Maybe Bob believed he could close the gap by following in his brother’s footsteps. But in the end, he conceded like many others, “I don’t think I ever really knew Bing. I think Bing got frightened when he made his successful appearance, after he left the Whi
teman band, at the Paramount Theater. And when he saw his name on the marquee in great big letters, he really got very frightened. And I think — I fantasize about this — that he built a cellophane bag and sealed himself inside and didn’t let anyone inside because they knew he was shy and that he couldn’t say no. He was an easy touch.” 20
Late in life Bob described him as “a fine man, a fine brother” and recalled how much Bing had done to establish him. 21 When Bob hit the big time, Bing presented his orchestra on Kraft Music Hall, introduced it at the Palomar Ballroom, and appeared as a guest on Bob’s radio show. He also helped him out of financial problems and made records with him. Yet more often than not, they kept their distance.
When Bob sought management and publicity advice in 1939, Larry set him up with Barney McDevitt at Rockwell-O’Keefe. But when asked why he and Bing had never sung together, Bob could only answer, “I don’t know. He never asked me. You don’t argue with the Bank of America.” 22 Bob never overcame a sense of hopeless competition. He explained why he agreed to front the big band: “I got sick and tired of everybody telling me, well, you don’t sound as well as your brother Bing does when you sing. I figured, I’m a bandleader now and I got a better band than Bing has, because he never had one. So I topped him there.” 23 Bob’s most impervious fan, despite his fall from grace, was his mother, who once confided to a startled Rosemary Clooney, “You know, Bob’s the real talent in the family.” 24 His disengagement from Bing and his family was made evident to Rosemary at Bing’s funeral when he walked over to her son, Miguel, and said, “Hi, I’m your uncle Bob.” He had mistaken him for Bing’s fifth son, Harry.