12

DIXIE

They say I left a trail of broken hearts behind me when I left California for New York. Now I wouldn’t do a thing like that. The fact is I left a trail of broken bottles and unpaid bills.

— Bing Crosby (1931) ¹

For years a story circulated on the Fox lot about an eye-level chink in the exterior of one building’s wall. The culprit was peppery Dixie Lee. Whenever she passed, a swain or two could be depended upon to whistle, “I wish I were in Dixie.” ² On one occasion she picked up a stone and hurled it in the direction of her tormentor with such force as to cause the damage, which naturally came to be known as Dixie’s Hole. Dixie was no pushover, but she was a relatively typical product of the era: a shapely, shy, talented, if not especially ambitious teenager for whom show business was as much a lark as a living. In an age of infinite chorus lines (employed on the stage, in movies, at nightclubs), not even a depression could quell the demand for attractive young women with educated legs or lilting voices or inviting smiles. Dixie was lovelier than most and more capable; on film she radiated sauciness in a smart, sad-eyed way. She had a strong unaccented shopgirl’s voice and, like her contemporary Jean Harlow, was fashionably plebeian. Harlow, however, was the tough-broad type, whereas Dixie was vulnerable, acerbic but wounded.

From the time her father enrolled her in an amateur contest, she handled each show-business opportunity with aplomb. By the time she was eighteen, Dixie possessed a glamorously quizzical expression, as if she saw irony lurking everywhere. She was a knockout, with large brown eyes, a full lower lip, round cheeks to cushion a firm nose, and blond (or red or natural brown, depending on the year) hair falling in waves down the right side of her face. Men found her captivating, but like Bing’s, her appeal was genderproof; women were disarmed by her straight-arrow modesty. At five foot three and 115 pounds (as she informed the editor of her hometown newspaper), she somehow conveyed stature. Rory Burke, daughter of Bing’s lyricist Johnny Burke, thought she gave the illusion of height: “She had this tall look to her, lean and slim. I always think of her in a beautiful white gown with that beautiful blond hair.” ³

She was born Wilma Winifred Wyatt on November 4, 1911, in a handsome plank house with pitched roofs and a small covered porch in the Walnut Hill section of Harriman, Tennessee, to Evan Wyatt and the former Nora Scarbrough. ⁴ Her family had lived in Tennessee for generations; her grandfather, Jim Wyatt, was known throughout local counties as a singer and vocal coach. Billie, as Wilma was known from early childhood, was four when the family relocated to Memphis. The move may have been the result of her father’s career as an insurance salesman or may have stemmed from the desire to escape the scene of tragedy: Billie’s two older sisters had died of rheumatic fever within a year of each other. After seven years in Memphis, the Wyatts moved to New Orleans, where Billie grew friendly with the slightly older Boswell sisters (they later sang offscreen in one of her movies), and then — when Billie was fourteen — to Chicago. ⁵ Three years later, she wryly recalled, “my theatrical career began.” ⁶

“I loved her dearly,” her lifelong friend Pauline Weislow recalled; they had met in high school. “Oh, she was very sweet, most generous, but shy. Her parents were nice people, no money at all, really. I used to go over to her house and we would borrow clothes from each other. Her dad would cut my hair when he cut hers. He was gentle, but he knew his own mind.” ⁷ Indeed, Mr. Wyatt was a voluble socialist given to tirades against organized religion. Billie was having a difficult time in high school and spoke to Pauline of quitting, when — in May 1928 — her father entered her in an amateur “blues singing” contest. ⁸ She made up a pseudonym “so all the kids wouldn’t know it was me if I lost.” ⁹ Performing as Dixie Carroll, she triumphed.

One of the judges was popular singer Ruth Etting, who must have noticed how much Dixie’s style owed to her own. Etting, apparently flattered, took an interest in her. The contest prize was a job at a roadhouse, College Inn, and Etting and music publisher Rocco Vocco arranged for Dixie to borrow a piano, pianist, and arrangements. ¹⁰ In October a talent scout passed through and offered her a part in the traveling company of Good News, which was then playing in Philadelphia. With her mother as chaperone, Dixie reluctantly agreed, realizing she would have to learn to dance at rehearsals. That turned out not to be a problem. Dixie was so proficient that after six weeks she was transferred to the Broadway company. When the star who created the role of Connie Lane, Mary Lawlor, became ill, Dixie subbed for her for nearly two months. A Fox agent spotted her and signed her to a contract to take effect when she completed her commitment to the show, which included a return to Chicago as lead understudy. When Dixie and her mother finally arrived in Hollywood, Fox’s chief of production, Winfield Sheehan, informed them that there were already two young Carrolls in town, Nancy Carroll and Sue Carol, and that her professional name would be Dixie Lee.

Dixie was quickly put to work and extensively promoted. “I was a big shot because I was a Broadway star,” she said, “yeah, I’d been on Broadway seven weeks!” ¹¹ She was featured in two 1929 pictures, Fox Movietone Follies and Why Leave Home?, and rushed into five more for release in 1930. ¹² In Happy Days she was given a flamboyant number, “Crazy Feet,” backed by thirty-two tap dancers. ¹³ So when Dixie reencountered Bing at a party in January 1930, she was several rungs up the ladder while he was a recently paroled singer who had just been rejected for picture work by the very man who was investing heavily in Dixie.

Several people later claimed credit for their second meeting. Holly Hall, Dixie’s roommate back in Chicago, told her husband, Bobby O’Brien (later a writer for Bing), that she made the match. But where? David Butler, who directed Dixie ten years before he directed Bing (in Road to Moroccoand others), said the party was at his place. Sol Wurtzel, who produced Dixie’s films at Fox, claimed the party was at his place. Richard Keene, an actor who appeared in Happy Days,said he was the party’s host — but in July, by which time Bing and Dixie had been steadies for six months. The first to speak up, however, was Marjorie White, an actress who appeared with Dixie in Fox Movietone Follies and Happy Days and said in the Los Angeles Times the week Bing and Dixie were wed that the party was at her place. ¹⁴ Wurtzel attained distinction of another kind, advising Dixie, “If you marry him, you’ll be supporting him for the rest of your life.” ¹⁵ Others agreed, including Dixie’s father, who considered him “a useless, good-for-nothing type.” ¹⁶ Dixie never forgave those who disparaged her husband. “Everybody’s saying they made Bing,” she said years later. “The same ones who told me, Don’t marry him — he’ll never amount to anything. Bing’s sweet to them, but I can’t be.” ¹⁷

That they deeply loved each other no one doubted. But though the marriage blossomed for the better part of a decade, publicly extolled as a fairy-tale romance, the story of Bing and Dixie is not a happy one. In the shorthand of Hollywood mythology, Dixie began drinking to keep up with Bing, then put her foot down and forced him to quit. As a result, his career took off while hers disappeared. As insecure as Bing was confident, Dixie was not ungrateful to escape the limelight, but by then her own drinking had gotten out of hand. Warning signs were apparent long before they tied the knot.

At first, Bing’s drinking was uncontained while Dixie’s was a less noticeable compulsion. Her high-school friend Pauline, who later danced in George White’s Scandals and became a member of Dixie’s Hollywood support group, observed, “I think what happened was she tried to compete and she was a shy person. She was afraid she couldn’t come up to the expectations of other people who she thought were so talented, and she couldn’t really talk to people unless she’d had a drink. Bing was private and Dixie was not only private, but unable to share anything that was wrong.” ¹⁸ Flo Haley, the widow of Jack Haley (the Tin Man in The Wizard ofOz) and for many years a Crosby neighbor, recalled Dixie as “a darling little girl. And she didn’t drink before she met Bing. It was the waiting for him at night, after the show, before they went home, that she’d have a drink. He’d say, ‘One for the road.’ But she didn’t have the tolerance he had. If she took more than two, it would bother her and then she’d have another one.” ¹⁹ In her final years Dixie confided in her doctor and friend, Dr. George J. Hummer, about her insecurities. “She was an introvert,” Hummer observed. “She said that she died every time before she went onscreen or onstage. You’d never know it by looking at her work. But when she used to sit down and talk to me about her stage fright, it was real, you know, very real.” ²⁰

Bing, though he denied it, was also familiar with stage fright, which he attempted — not always successfully — to curb with drink. Before he courted Dixie, he was infatuated with an older, much-married beauty of the era, Adeline Lamont, who hunted and drove racing cars and was known to friends as Buster. According to Buster’s daughter-in-law, actress Marsha Hunt, Bing was needed at the studio (presumably for the unfinished The March of Time) and panic ensued when he could not be located. He was traced back to Buster’s home in Coldwater Canyon, where he had attended a party the previous evening, and was found under her bed, terrified of having to report for work. “He was so shy, so nervous, that he was hiding out, or so the story went,” Marsha Hunt recalled. “But that elaborate, casual, laid-back style that he was so famous for must have been a carefully drawn cover for great self-consciousness. Boy, what an act of grace and understatement and charm.” ²¹

He was somewhat less than graceful in his marriage proposal, which Dixie recalled as a kind of self-improvement decision, as though he’d taken to heart Saint Paul’s dictum to put away childish things and saw her as a means to a long-postponed maturity. His brothers write in their biography that Bing told the other Rhythm Boys, “What I need is some responsibility, somebody for me to look out for, and somebody to look out for me, and in spite of my depleted financial condition, I think I’ll take the bull by the horns and get married.” ²² Reminded of that passage by a reporter in 1946, Dixie said it was not far from the truth.

During the first weeks of their courtship, Dixie lived in the beach home of Mabel Cooper, a rehearsal pianist at Fox and a few years her senior and very protective. Mabel’s son, child actor Jackie Cooper (his first film was Fox Movietone Follies), wrote of Bing’s constant hanging around, especially on weekends: “When I went outside those Sunday mornings, there would be Bing Crosby, asleep on the front porch swing, in his tuxedo and shoes with a flower in his buttonhole. I would get him a pillow and a blanket.” ²³ Bing was so infatuated with Dixie that he ventured to forewarn his mother. In early April, when Bing had been seeing his future wife for three months and was set to leave on his last tour with Whiteman, ²⁴ he closed a letter to Kate: “Incidentally I met a girl the other night whom I think you’d like. Her name is Dixie Lee and she works for Fox. Been taking her out quite a bit lately, and she’s kind of got me winging. Don’t get alarmed though, nothing serious yet. Or maybe there is. Love. Harry.” ²⁵

The letter undoubtedly masked apprehension about bringing up women, or romance, with his mother. But there was another issue, too. In considering marriage to Dixie, Bing was contemplating a step that, though taken by Kate herself, could only appall her. The son she fancied as a priest was considering a marriage out of faith, into the religion to which his father had been born. This cannot have been a casual decision, yet he did not insist that Dixie convert.

In the nine months between the beginning of their courtship and the day of their secretive wedding, Bing became increasingly determined to support Dixie and avoid the burden of being known as Mr. Lee. Dixie was skeptical at first (she found him “spoiled even then. He wore plus fours and yellow socks and hoped for a break in pictures”), but she soon succumbed. ²⁶ Although only eighteen, she displayed a nearly maternal dedication to his future. The cost was ruinous. In effect, she adopted Kate’s role, taking Bing in hand, pushing him forward, mothering him — hardly an auspicious tack for conjugal bliss. Her belief in Bing reassured and flattered him. But at twenty-seven, he continued to hold discipline at bay.

Bing’s final solo with Whiteman, recorded shortly before the last tour, was a song written for a Maurice Chevalier film that Bing might have adapted as his slogan, “Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight”:

Things that bother you, they never bother me, I think everything’s fine,

Living in the sunlight, loving in the moonlight, having a wonderful time.

Just take it from me, I’m just as free as any dove.

I do what I like, just when I like, and how I love it.

I don’t give a hoot, give my cares the boot, all the world is in rhyme,

Living in the sunlight, loving in the moonlight, having a wonderful time.

With the Whiteman association over, the Rhythm Boys could hardly wait to return to California’s sunshine, though as Al conceded, “The opportunities for performing and finding work were not as available as in New York.” ²⁷ Dixie, anxious to keep Bing in town, encouraged him as the group made the rounds. They found a brief stint on radio, and then cooled their heels for a few weeks until a young agent, Leonard Goldstein, landed them a week’s work at $250 each on a two-reeler, a last-ditch try by Pathe Exchange to skirt insolvency. The movie, a halfhearted burlesque of the hoariest of melodramas, concerns a greedy landlord who threatens to evict an old man and his daughter into the cold. It was first conceived as a showcase for Yiddish character actor Nat Carr. As the tailor in jeopardy, Carr is admired by the boys at Tait College (a nod to Good News), who call him Ripstitch and spend their time playing ukeleles and shooting craps. The Rhythm Boys were to be included among the college boys. On May 23, the day they made their last Columbia record (an amiable version of “A Bench in the Park”), a script was submitted to producer Fred Guiol and director Ray McCarey for Plus Eights, a title they changed to Two Plus Fours.

The most amusing aspect of Two Plus Fours is that the Rhythm Boy singled out for stardom by Ray McCarey (brother of Leo McCarey, who went on to create Bing’s Father O’Malley pictures) was Harry Barris, on whom he ladled key lines, close-ups, and even the girl. Harry has pizzazz to spare, but his collegiate wiseguy stuff was old hat even then. Al gets lost in the crowd while Bing seems inattentive and bored, even at the end when he sings a solo verse of “The Stein Song” (a current Rudy Vallee hit), affects a dancer’s bearing from the waist up, and then bops the landlord on the head while doing a comical entrechat with fluttery hands — mock-balletic poses that would recur throughout his career. Shot in five days at a cost of more than $19,000, it previewed mid-June, shipped early July, and disappeared, taking Pathe with it.

Yet Bing persisted in the belief that he could make it as an actor, despite his lack of experience (beyond plays at Gonzaga), his ready acknowledgment of his thespian limitations, and his looks, which did not jibe with the vogue in leading men. He was appealing, to be sure, with azure eyes and handsome features, but he had those wingy ears, a rapidly receding hairline, and an expanding waist. In just about every interview he ever gave, Bing was consistently and unreasonably modest about his abilities as an actor. He even, perhaps disingenuously, remarked that he won his 1944 Oscar because the good actors were away doing war work. (His rival nominees included Cary Grant and Charles Boyer.) He insisted that all he ever did was play himself.

The wonder is that he was so certain playing himself would do the trick. Bing quietly, pragmatically weighed his strengths and limitations, confident that the former would carry the day. In the long view, he probably shortchanged his dramatic talents by clinging too closely to the Bing Crosby persona. Yet in 1930 that persona existed only in his mind. His belief that he could beat the odds by being himself followed from his conviction that he could remake himself as a “type,” a new movie genus, Bingus crosbyanis. In learning to play himself, he had to invent himself. And he invented himself as a man whose decency others might want to emulate.

Rumors circulated that he took bit parts whenever he could; Bing or the Rhythm Boys were said to have been involved in such obscurities as The Lottery Bride and Many a Slip, either blending into crowds or landing on the cutting-room floor. One newspaper reported that Bing and Dixie were slated for MGM’s film of Good News; if in fact they were considered for that adaptation, Bing must have been especially galled to learn that the juvenile lead went to Stanley Smith (who had recently beat him out for a part in Honey), while the femme lead went to the oddly disconsolate stage star Mary Lawlor, who lacked Dixie’s spirit.

While the Rhythm Boys were spinning their wheels, agents were more than willing to take a chance on them. Bing all too casually encouraged more than a few, including Everett, who did not quite understand the business yet; William Perlberg, who had arranged the Montmartre job; and Edward Small, who sued when Bing hit the big time. But the guy who came through in their hour of need was Leonard Goldstein. Years later, when Goldstein was reaping a fortune with quickie westerns and lowbrow franchises (Ma and Pa Kettle, Francis the Talking Mule), he regaled journalists with his claims of discovering Bing: “I found him in the gutter. He chucked a cigar butt, and there I was right after it.” ²⁸ Two Plus Fours had not helped either of them. Now he had a better idea.

Goldstein had first heard Bing and Al when they were with the Morrissey revue. His twin brother, Bob, later a power at Fox, was then manager of Abe Lyman, renowned for leading the orchestra at the Ambassador Hotel’s Cocoanut Grove. Leonard tried in vain to get Lyman to hire the Rhythm Boys. When Lyman left the Grove in 1926, his pianist, Gus Arnheim, took charge for three years. Arnheim, in turn, left for a lengthy tour; during the years the Rhythm Boys were making their name with Whiteman, he traveled to Europe and enhanced his reputation before returning to the Grove in early 1930. Goldstein knew Arnheim would appreciate what Lyman had declined. The Grove’s manager, Abe Frank, agreed to hire the boys at $450 a week, $50 less per man than they had received from Whiteman. Goldstein was not happy and neither were the boys, but they accepted the offer. Gus Arnheim and arranger Jimmy Grier, a friend and fan of Bing’s, were ecstatic.

The Ambassador Hotel, with its private bungalows, intrigued the film crowd from the time it opened on Wilshire Boulevard in 1920. Abe Frank knew that a nightclub on the premises could not miss. Within a year the main ballroom was transformed into the 1,000-seat Cocoanut Grove, complete with prop palm trees and fake monkeys grabbing fake coconuts. By 1930 the style was Hollywood Moroccan; the palms and monkeys were set against white stucco arches, and a red carpet extended from the top of a wide stairway in the hotel lobby all the way to the Grove. The Depression could not lay a glove on the place. Limousines crowded the entrance at night. On July 14 at 10:00 P.M.,Arnheim featured the Rhythm Boys in his two-hour broadcast over KNX, a powerful station that covered the Pacific Coast and reached as far inland as Colorado. The next night he officially introduced them to the audience at the Grove, and they were a sensation.

Much of young Hollywood had heard the trio at the Montmartre a year before, but the Grove was more established and posh, well known for its star nights and college nights, and as the venue (through 1936) for the Academy Awards ceremony. The Grove merged society (royalty, mobsters) and moviedom, a flush following that adored the Rhythm Boys, who appeared nightly and at Saturday teas. “We would show off our latest outfits generally on Tuesday nights, which is when the Hollywood crowd of that time gathered regularly at the Cocoanut Grove,” director Mervyn LeRoy recalled. “We would all have the same table, week after week. We went to see, and to be seen.” ²⁹

If you couldn’t get in, you could hear them on the two-hour radio broadcasts. Anthony Quinn, a kid who would later appear in three of Bing’s movies, never missed a broadcast. He was the only one in his Mexican American neighborhood with a radio: “All the kids from all over would gather out my window and I would turn the sound up so that they could hear [Bing]. So he was quite a hero to us.” ³⁰

Arnheim’s was strictly a sweet band, but he admired good musicians — he apprenticed such jazz stars as Woody Herman, Budd Johnson, and Stan Kenton. He recruited Loyce Whiteman, who was courted by the recently divorced Barris, and Irish tenor Donald Novis at the same time as the Rhythm Boys but counted on the trio to add zest to a fourteen-piece outfit that, by Paul Whiteman’s standards, was stiff and impassive. One band member whose life was transfigured by Bing was Russ Columbo, a capable violinist who knew just enough Joe Venuti licks to handle a two-bar break. Russ doubled as singer with two other musicians in a high-voiced trio, but what made him stand out were his dark good looks. A Valentino type with slicked-back hair, he was personable and alert, smiling as he played. After observing Bing for a few months, he began to appreciate what could be done with a microphone (he could barely be heard without one) and realized he was a light baritone, not a tenor, and could put over a ballad in a manner not unlike Bing’s. Some listeners claimed they could not tell the difference on evenings when Bing failed to show and Columbo went on in his place. Neither Goldstein nor Bing was amused by the similarity; Columbo soon left Arnheim to embark on a successful if tragically short-lived career.

At first the Grove engagement seemed charmed. Bing spent his days at the golf course and encountered little pressure on the job. He behaved. Movie stars said hello and became friends. For a change, Al did some drinking while Harry continued to nip at his flask, but Bing generally abstained. In those first few months, Bing established himself as a ballad soloist with no little help from Barris, whose song-writing efforts finally paid off in tunes discerningly tailored to the Crosby cry. They worked out a schedule with Arnheim. Once a night, between dances, they performed one of their numbers alone on the bandstand. For the rest of the evening, they sang choruses with the band. Al noticed something he had not seen before: “When the Rhythm Boys or Bing were singing from the bandstand all the dancers… would practically stand still and watch us and when the band took over they would dance again.” ³¹

The more observant gawkers may have realized they were witnessing something historic: Bing’s innovative perfection of a new instrument, the microphone. It was his ultimate ally, perfectly suited to his way with dynamics and nuance and timbre. As he explored gradations in projection, Bing collaborated with the electric current as if he were romancing a woman. He played the mike with a virtuosity that influenced every singer to follow, grounding it as a vehicle of modernism. Overnight, megaphones became a joke, as the tradition of vocal shouting receded into an instant prehistory. Two years earlier Al Jolson had been at the peak of his popularity; now he would be recast as the beloved reminder of old-fashioned show business. With the microphone elaborating the subtleties of his delivery, Bing was reinventing popular music as a personal and consequently erotic medium.

The modern style of American popular singing, as distinct from the theatrical emoting of the minstrel and vaudeville eras, dominated the interpretation, understanding, and even the composition of contemporary songs throughout the Western world for most of the twentieth century. That style was originated by four performers, each to some degree rooted in jazz and blues: Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, and Bing Crosby. The first to make their influence felt were Smith, born in 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Waters, born two years later in Chester, Pennsylvania. Both women were formed in the crucible of tent shows and black vaudeville; their talents were tried and tested by audiences that dared them not to be great. Inevitably, they became rivals, and Ethel’s popular triumph over Bessie, whom she described as “all champ” ³² and whom her contemporaries acknowledged as Empress of the Blues, represents a moment when the black blues tradition was assimilated by mainstream American pop.

In their day Smith was the least widely known of the four, but as the finest heavy-voiced blues singing (some said shouting) contralto of the era, she influenced Waters and Louis Armstrong. She established vocal techniques intrinsic to the American style, notably an undulating attack in which notes are stretched, bent, curved, moaned, and hollered. Smith perfected and popularized an old style of melisma that Jeannette Robinson Murphy captured with lively accuracy in an 1899 issue of Popular Science Monthly. Attempting to instruct white singers in the art of “genuine Negro melodies,” Murphy asked:

What is there to show him that he must make his voice exceedingly nasal and undulating; that around every prominent note he must place a variety of small notes, called “trimmings,” and he must sing tones not found in our scale; that he must on no account leave one note until he has the next one well under control?… He must often drop from a high note to a very low one; he must be very careful to divide many of his monosyllabic words in two syllables…. He must also intersperse his singing with peculiar humming sounds — “hum-m-m-m.” ³³

Murphy titled her article “The Survival of African Music in America,” but as musicologist Peter Van Der Merwe has shown, the stylistic elements she enumerated could also be found in Celtic music, particularly the Irish caoin, or lament. That may help to explain why the impact of Bessie Smith and other blues singers was felt most profoundly not only among Sephardic Jews, who shared with African Americans the tradition of the pentatonic scale, and Italians, who reveled in operatic projection, but by the Irish in precincts like the one in Spokane. Smith brought to modern American popular music the freedom to ad-lib melody and rhythm. Given her range of little more than an octave, she proved that emotional power does not depend on conventional vocal abilities.

Ethel Waters was another story. Though initially characterized as a blues singer, she came to embody the aspirations of black performers determined to make it on “white time.” With her lighter voice and higher range, she may have lacked the weighty sonority of Bessie Smith, but her superb enunciation and gift for mimickry established her as a virtuoso capable of irrepressible eroticism (she was the queen of the double entendre) and high-toned gentility. Sophie Tucker, one of the giants of white vaudeville, was so taken with young Ethel that she offered to pay her for singing lessons. Young white jazz acolytes of the 1920s were mesmerized by Waters and Smith, but it was Ethel’s smooth, articulate attack that had the greater appeal for Bing when Mildred introduced him to her records. If Bessie belonged to the blues, Ethel stood astride the whole swirling tapestry of American song.

Like a world-shaking conqueror — Alexander the Great razing Thebes yet creating Alexandria — Louis Armstrong was the most extreme force American music had ever known. A man of exceptional generosity, Armstrong would have been incapable of consciously destroying anything. Yet having assimilated almost every valuable tradition in nineteenth-century vernacular music, sacred or secular, he offered a comprehensive revision that supplanted them all. Born in the direst and most violent district of New Orleans, in 1901, he liberated American music instrumentally and vocally, uniting high and low culture. The mandarins wanted an American voice, and here it was — improvised yet durable, serious yet ribald, resolute yet startling. Musicians were permanently transformed by him and his music; they went away feeling freer, more optimistic, ambitious, and willing to take risks. Louis anchored — as Bessie Smith could not — blues as the foundation of America’s new music. He proved — as Ethel Waters could not — that swing, a seductive canter as natural and personal as your heartbeat, was its irreducible rhythmic framework.

Bing Crosby was the first and, for a while, the only white singer who fully assimilated the shock of Armstrong’s impact, and his loyalty never wavered. A year before he died, while playing the London Palladium, Crosby learned of the death of his friend, lyricist Johnny Mercer. The BBC requested an interview and sent a camera crew to the theater. Joe Bushkin, the pianist and leader of Bing’s quartet, recalled that Bing was very upset and spoke at length to the reporter of his friendship with Mercer; toward the end of the interview, Bing added, “I loved his singing.” Afterward, Bushkin told him how glad he was that Bing had mentioned Johnny’s often neglected singing. They reminisced about Mercer, when out of the blue, Bing said, “I gotta tell you, Joe, do you realize that the greatest pop singer in the world that ever was and ever will be forever and ever is Louis Armstrong?” Bushkin said, “Of course, I love Louis’s singing.” Bing said, “It’s so simple. When he sings a sad song you feel like crying, when he sings a happy song you feel like laughing. What the hell else is there with pop singing?” ³⁴

One of the most significant things Bing learned from Louis was that the contagious pulse later called swing did not have to be exclusive to jazz. It was a universally expressive technique that could deepen the interpretation of any song in any setting. However subtle or modest, that pulse created a steady grid while focusing the song’s momentum. Bing’s uncanny ability to hear “the one” — the downbeat of each measure — was unheard of among white singers in the 1920s. It never left him. Jake Hanna, the drummer in Bushkin’s quartet, insisted, “Bing had the best, the absolute best time. And I played with Count Basie and that’s great time. You just followed him and he carried you right along, and so unassuming.” ³⁵ Most of the singers who imitated Bing in the twenties and thirties — Russ Columbo, Perry Como, Dick Todd — took the superficial aspects of his style without the jazz foundation, which is why so much of their work is antiquated. Bing, on the other hand, did not imitate Armstrong; he understood that Louis’s message was to be yourself. That meant not simulating a black aesthetic but applying it to who he was and what he knew as a Northwestern third-generation Anglo-Irish Catholic, reared on John McCormack and Al Jolson, Dixieland and dance music, elocution and minstrelsy, comedy and vaudeville.

In addition to exemplary time and articulation, Bing was blessed with sterling pitch. “He was always on target,” said Milt Hinton, who played bass with the Bushkin quartet. “He was very theoretical about his singing, about diction and dynamics and things like that. I said, ‘How in the hell do you do that?’ He said, ‘Well, I get in my car and go to the golf course and I’m singing in my car, and when I’m playing I’m singing.’ His selection of words and what the meaning of a particular word was — he would really think about it, you know. You usually just hear a guy sing, but Bing knew the meaning of words and how he wanted the band to accent those certain things.” ³⁶

To the mix as developed by Smith, Waters, and Armstrong, Bing added three elements that proved crucial to the fulfillment of popular singing: his expansive repertoire, expressive intimacy, and spotless timbre. Those facets grounded him as the first great ballad singer in jazz. Ethel Waters recorded a few ballads before Bing, but in a bold, plangent style more appropriate to vaudeville than romance. Bing prompted singers — and instrumentalists — to go beyond the familiar repertoire, even as he inspired songsmiths to handcraft ballads suitable to his singular talent. His sound had little precedent: rich, strong, masculine, and clean. Listeners who were put off by vernacular growls and moans could understand his relatively immaculate approach. Having absorbed his early influences, he rarely borrowed the expressive colorations of the blues. His one accommodation to the pervasive use of melisma was the Irish mordent. His phrasing was his own, aggressive yet gentle, heartfelt yet humorous.

Few patrons at the Cocoanut Grove could have foreseen how far Bing’s renown would advance. But thousands of fans, even at that early stage, knew they were hearing something new and personal — a performer who sang to you, not at you, who told a story, who made you cry and laugh. The movie colony adopted and championed him. Veteran actor Walter Huston remembered him in those days as “one of the most likable, friendly fellows that I have ever met.” ³⁷ Most of those cheering were of the younger generation. Lupe Velez introduced Bing to Gary Cooper, who became a good pal; they sailed together, often with Richard Arlen. When Bing finally won the attention of the studios, he turned down generous offers from Fox and Warners to follow Cooper to Paramount; a year later he named his first son after him.

Songwriters and publishers often dropped by the Grove, as did directors and producers. So did childhood friends, including Bing’s Gonzaga rival, Mike Pecarovich, who now coached at Loyola and occasionally brought his students to hear Bing. Bud Brubaker, a Pecarovich ballplayer who later became operations manager at Del Mar racetrack, recalled, “It was always jam-packed. They had a small dance floor and everybody was dancing. The Rhythm Boys would come out and sing six or eight songs during the evening’s program and Bing was already the leader. His style was completely different than anybody else. We’d dress semiformal and everybody had a date. It was Prohibition so they couldn’t serve booze. You brought your own. What you’d do is order fruit punch or something like that and they would bring you a setup and then you’d pour your own under the table. No one bothered you.” ³⁸

One of Bing’s most eminent fans was Duke Ellington, visiting Hollywood to make his feature debut in the Amos ‘n’ Andy vehicle Check and Double Check. Duke’s spot required him to introduce the Kalmar and Ruby song “Three Little Words,” but at rehearsal it was evident that the three members of his brass section assigned the vocal could not handle it. When another trio fared no better, Ellington told the producer to hire the Rhythm Boys. Given the decree against exhibiting white singers with a black band (never mind that the stars of the movie were white actors in blackface), the boys were set up behind the backdrop with a separate microphone. The number was filmed and recorded live. As they sang, the three Ellington musicians lip-synched — it was the kind of charade parodied in Singin’ in the Rain. Ellington asked the Rhythm Boys to sing on the record, too, and by December “Three Little Words” topped every sales chart in the country. During the next decade Ellington refused to hire a male vocalist until he could find one (Herb Jeffries) who sang a la Bing.

Another movie deal was sealed at the Grove, but this time the request was for Bing alone. Edmund Goulding, who was writing and directing a Douglas Fairbanks musical, Reaching for the Moon, was so entranced by Bing that he asked executive Joe Schenck to hire Crosby to sing “When the Folks High Up Do the Mean Low Down,” the jazziest number in the Irving Berlin score. Bing’s screen time is little more than a minute: he bursts into an ocean-liner lounge with a greeting, “Hi, gang!” and sings one rocking chorus, arms waving in rhythm, then listens as the song is reprised by leading lady Bebe Daniels and June MacCloy, a Paramount starlet on loan. When the footage was edited, United Artists cut out all but one of the songs and released the film as a romantic comedy — enraging Berlin, who never allowed UA to use his work after that.

Bing’s was the only number that survived. He shot it late at night (again, without prerecording), after finishing a set at the Grove. “We went in cold as cucumbers,” recalled June MacCloy. “We heard the song and they just told us where to come in. It seems to me Bing may have had a chance to sing the whole song and that it was cut down. I think he liked having the job, because we were well paid, but he was disgusted because we were supposed to do another song that was never shot. Edward Everett Horton was also in the film and he talked with Bing quite a bit. They laughed and talked a lot. Everyone liked Bing, he was very likable. He didn’t change keys on things. Everybody was pleased about that. Once in a while, when they were getting ready to take another shot, he’d be by the piano, but they never had to change the key for him.” ³⁹

Fairbanks insisted that the crew break every day at four for tea, and though Bing did no filming during the afternoons, he liked to drop by and the cast liked having him. Songwriters and musicians who visited to carouse with Fairbanks also wanted to meet Bing. As far as MacCloy could see, all Bing drank was tea. “We started laughing, like ‘What kind of sissy stuff is this?’ But we liked it. We were quite tickled that Fairbanks insisted that the grips have some too. There was caviar and everything on the table, and I’m talking about the real good stuff. They must have spent a bloody fortune on that. Bing used to come to those and everybody wanted him to sing, because we had been down to the Ambassador, always dressed to the nines, to hear him with Al Rinker and Harry Barris, who were flying. After that he still sang at the Ambassador, and every time I had a date and went down there, Bing gave me recognition from the stand. I was very pleased about that and my date would say, ‘Oh, you know him, you know Bing?’” ⁴⁰

Bing’s friendship with Louis Armstrong, presaged by Mildred Bailey, begun in Chicago, and advanced in Harlem, now deepened in Los Angeles. Louis reminisced:

In 1930 I went out to California to join the band which was playing at Frank Sebastian’s Cotton Club. Bing and his Trio were really romping with Gus Arnheim’s Orchestra at the Cocoanut Grove Hotel in Hollywood. The Cotton Club was out in Culver City. Every night between their outfit and our outfit, we used to Burn up the air, every night…. Yea — Bing & Gus Arnheim & Co would broadcast first every night and leave the ether wave sizzling hot. Just right for us when we would burst on in there from the Cotton Club. Oh, it was lots of fun. The same listeners would catch both programs before going to bed. After Bing — the band — Mr. Arnheim and boys would finish work at the Grove they would haul ashes over to the Cotton Club where we were playing and swing with us, until Home Sweet Home was played. Sometimes he would come over wearing his sharp uniform, the one I admired so much. It was a hard hitting blue with white buttons, which made him look (to me) like a young Captain on some high powered yacht. That’s when he and Dixie Lee were CANOEING. ⁴¹

On September 29, with Bing reaping what by Hollywood standards was at least a nascent success and apparently controlling his drinking, he and Dixie quit canoeing, discarded the advice of those who thought she was sacrificing a hot career to a ne’er-do-well, and tied the knot. Dixie applied for the license under her birth name, thereby keeping the wedding — at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Hollywood — a secret until the morning of the day it took place; the license made out to Wilma Wyatt and Harry Crosby raised no flags. Not even her mother knew until the day of the ceremony, when she and a dozen others received phone invitations from the couple. Dixie’s bridesmaid was a friend from high school, Betty Zimmerman. Everett served as best man and provided his home for the reception.

The question of religious differences was kept quiet. Most people in and out of Hollywood assumed Dixie had taken her vows, but she remained outside the Catholic Church until a conversion on her deathbed. If Bing asked her to convert early on, he willingly accepted her refusal to do so. Kate Crosby, on the other hand, harbored a resentment that came roaring to the surface when the marriage almost collapsed in the 1940s. Dixie agreed to raise the children Catholic, though she did not attend church — a father-and-sons ritual — and was not pleased when the eldest boy, Gary, suggested he might like to become a priest. “Mom never bad-mouthed the church,” Gary remembered. “On the contrary. Even though she wasn’t a Catholic, she was the one who stayed on our case about showing up for mass on Sunday and meeting our other religious obligations. ‘If you’re going to be in a religion,’ she would lecture us, ‘if you’re doing something you believe in, then you do it all the way.’ Whenever Grandpa Wyatt started in on one of his tirades against the pope and big-time religion, she shushed him on the spot.” ⁴² Even in 1930 Bing never missed mass, no matter how late or wild the previous evening.

One Spokane paper loyally reported, BING CROSBY WEDS ACTRESS, ⁴³ but another accurately reflected the typical coverage: SPOKANE BOY WEDS FILM STAR. ⁴⁴ Bing was thought to be coming up in the world. How far he had to go was implied by the account in the New York Times, headlined, DIXIE LEE IS MARRIED: “Dixie Lee, film actress, was married today to Murray Crosey, 26 years old, orchestra leader, at a simple church ceremony.” ⁴⁵ Most of Dixie’s fans got Bing’s name right but were not particularly wowed by her choice of husband. Basil Grillo, who was “very enamored of Dixie Lee in those days,” remembered, “I was in college and absolutely heartbroken. I couldn’t figure out why she would marry a lousy crooner. “ Grillo would eventually direct Bing Crosby Enterprises, earn the crooner his fortune, and learn that “Dixie was a very bright, smart woman, with the sharpest tongue anybody could ever imagine. She cut him down to size fast. Man!” ⁴⁶

The Los Angeles Times concluded its report, “There isn’t to be any honeymoon trip as both young people are too busy in their professions at this time to be able to spare time to go away.” ⁴⁷ Dixie later acknowledged that they did not honeymoon because they were strapped for money. They had yet to find a home and for two weeks lived in Sue Carol’s house while Sue visited New York. Carol had become one of Dixie’s closest and most protective friends, along with Pauline Weislow and Alice Ross, who later worked as Dixie’s secretary.

Dixie was a magnet for mother hens. Flo Haley recalled, “She was damned sweet. She never hurt anybody. But she was sensitive, way down, and she didn’t have a sister. She needed people around her, like someone to console you, to say, ‘Come on, we’ll go after this and do that.’ “ ⁴⁸ Sue assuaged Dixie’s fears and sheltered her on and off the Fox lot. Eight years older than Dixie, she had social status and knew the ropes. The two women became inseparable; when Sue’s marriage to actor Nick Stuart came apart, she stayed with the Crosbys. They had both been relieved to marry and leave the business, though Sue demonstrated more than a touch of sentiment when she named her daughter Carol Lee, fusing the names Hollywood bestowed upon her (Sue was born Evelyn Lederer) and upon Dixie.

Those two weeks at Sue’s were all the time Bing and Dixie had to cement their marriage. On October 14 Dixie, on loan to Paramount from Fox, was sent to New York (Astoria Studios) for a Clara Bow picture, No Limit, intended as the “It” girl’s comeback. Bing resented putting her on the train but was in no position to suggest she stop working. By the time she returned, more than two months later, things appeared to be turning his way. In preparation for Dixie’s homecoming in late December, he planned a reception at the train station and asked Louis Armstrong to preside: “Oh — Daddy Bing — Harry Barris and Al Rinker — they gave me all sorts of inducements, etc. to just go down to the station and sorta toot a few hot ones as she hit the ground from the train,” Louis recalled. ⁴⁹ But Armstrong had romantic plans of his own that night. As the Rhythm Boys serenaded Dixie, Bing had more to commemorate than her arrival. In her absence, his confidence as a singer had turned a corner.

* * *

Bing made only eleven records with Arnheim, between October 1930 and May 1931, and they pack a wallop. They mark the end of Bing’s career as a dance-band vocalist and a redefinition of his style, from Jazz Age emoter to poised soloist. Moreover, they served as calling cards, bringing him to the attention of three men — Mack Sennett, Jack Kapp, and William Paley — who helped ignite the Bing Crosby Era, a quarter century stretch during which no other performer rivaled his dominance in popular entertainment.

Significantly, only one of the Arnheim sides features the Rhythm Boys, yet the three best-remembered Bing vehicles are the work of Barris. Small wonder that Rinker was feeling “more dissatisfied” with his role in the Rhythm Boys. ⁵⁰ The trio’s last appearance on records was a capable version of “Them There Eyes,” a song memorably claimed by Billie Holiday in 1939. The harmonizing is sure, but compared with Bing’s solo discs, the net effect is pallid; the sound of the trio could no longer compare with the sound of Bing alone. A scat episode dominated by the zealous Harry and a breezily swinging final chorus feel frozen and of a fading era. Still, the record was a hit, a last hurrah boosted by their frequent radio renditions. It was quickly swamped by the revelation of Bing’s new ballad style.

If his microphone experience at the Grove cured him of the need to belt out a song, his jazz experience indemnified him from the temptations of anemic crooning. Bing soared beyond the restraints of the Arnheim band, which though adept at a jumpy rhythm was too hidebound to really swing. He pitched his vocals as much from the throat as from the diaphragm in an attempt to minutely control shading and breathing. This was a calmer, steadier Bing, even on inferior songs. He subtly winks at the lyric of “Fool Me Some More” and provides the record’s only rhythmic jolt by syncopating the first beat of his last eight bars. He imbues Berlin’s negligible “The Little Things in Life” (cut from Reaching for the Moon) with the authority of a man willing to sell a song on its own terms.

On good songs his heightened authority is unmistakable. A major tune that year and a Grove favorite was James P. Johnson’s “If I Could Be with You (One Hour Tonight),” which became a jazz classic with the release of three highly inventive hit records by Louis Armstrong, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers (with Benny Carter), and the Mound City Blue Blowers (with Coleman Hawkins and Pee Wee Russell). The melody inspired jazz musicians, and Bing’s rendition inspired Barris to concoct a secondary theme, which Jimmy Grier arranged as accompaniment to Bing’s vocal. Bing liked the second strain so well that, at his suggestion, Harry asked Gordon Clifford to write a lyric, transforming a countermelody into a song, “It Must Be True.” Arranged by Grier over a lazy two-beat with a chorus of Bing’s most impetuous whistling to date, the recorded version was released as the flip side of “Them There Eyes” and exceeded it in popularity. The second Crosby-Barris-Grier record, early in the New Year of 1931, proved to be a milestone.

“I Surrender, Dear” renovated Bing’s professional stature on several counts. Barris configured the melody after hearing Bing sing a variation on “Lover, Come Back to Me,” and Gordon Clifford wrote the lyric. From the time Bing introduced it, the song was hugely popular at the Grove and on radio; he was often asked to sing it several times in an evening. The recording is startling, calling attention to itself with an unconventional arrangement that defied dancers with its frequent change-ups in tempo and manner. Grier had written a concert-style orchestration of a popular song, and though the effect superficially resembled Whiteman’s more inflated numbers, the result was cogently novel. It begins with an introduction by trombones and strings, essays the verse with sixteen bars of fox-trotting strings followed by jazz trumpet and solo clarinet, and then sets the stage for Bing’s entrance with a splendid two-bar ensemble transition. Even his chorus, elaborately supported by the band, has a change-up: he sings the bridge over modified stop-time rhythm. The ensuing instrumental chorus starts with trombone and strings intimating an Eastern strain, and leads to muted trumpets and responsive violins, a stop-time clarinet, a bridge that suggests a Polish wedding dance, and a finish that combines rigidly marching trombones and a crescendo from which Bing’s voice glides for a brief reprise.

With Bing wrapping the word dear around a shapely mordent, sculpting dynamics, and impeccably articulating every word and pitch in a climbing melody that parallels the rising ardor in his voice (or vice versa), the performance is if not his finest to date, then certainly his most paradigmatic. Bing’s huskiness is wonderfully captured by the Victor technicians (a perquisite of recording with Arnheim), and his projection is at once forceful and restrained. The success of the record amplified his national reputation and all but buried the Rhythm Boys; for as popular as they were, radio audiences wanted to hear that astonishing singer with the throb in his voice, not a trio of hepcats. Perhaps the prime indication of Bing’s elevated stature was Louis Armstrong’s cover of “I Surrender, Dear,” which Rudy Vallee — in recounting Armstrong’s influence on Bing, Russ Columbo, Mildred Bailey, and others — proclaimed a masterpiece. ⁵¹ Before the year was out, Louis covered two more Crosby signature tunes, “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” and “Star Dust,” and often paid homage (“I’m Confessin’ “) to his friend with crooning asides and telling mordents.

Louis was not alone. Bing was now imitable, not only in the positive sense but also as an object of parody. When Bing leaned too heavily on mannerisms, he courted the kind of mockery that, on the heels of his movie breakthrough, unleashed a generation of bu-bu-bu-boo impressionists. Only Dixie had the temerity to emphasize the danger, and did so with devastating precision late in 1931, in Rudy Wiedoeft’s Vitaphone short Darn Tootiri’, singing Bing’s hit of the moment, “I Apologize.” She reveals no overt indication of parody, but her droll mordent-heavy performance is spot-on. Bing got the message, after a period of testing, indulging, and rejecting diverse affectations. At his next Arnheim session, Bing turned in a rigorous performance of “Thanks to You,” investing trite material with a glowing conviction as fresh and innovative as anything heard in American song. That same day he recorded the romping “One More Time” and the finest of Barris’s songs (lyric by Ted Koehler and Billy Moll), “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” in which Bing combines whistling and singspiel and finesses a bel canto second chorus variation. He continued to explore emotional range, from the vibrant “I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store),” with its jaunty release and soaring finish, to the amorous “At Your Command,” backed only by its composer, Harry Barris, and complete with an interlude of fauxRachmaninoff pounding.

With records like “Thanks to You,” Bing heralded the end of songpluggers and the tyranny of sheet music — although he appeared on more sheet-music covers than anyone else. Neutral or detached renditions designed to boost the song gave way to individualized interpretations. In blending and mainstreaming all he had learned from Jolson, Armstrong, Waters, and others, Bing personalized and deepened pop. Jazz adapts material with a brashness expounded in Trummy Young’s song “Tain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It).” Bing showed that a popular singer could be just as much in command. Yet he created an illusion of commonality. Bing, like Jolson, was unique, but unlike Jolson, he was at the same time Everyman. Jolson threw himself at his listeners; Crosby made his listeners come to him. Jolson inspired them to cheer him; Crosby seduced them into contemplation. Most radio fans did not know what he looked like, yet they responded to him with the sighs and blushes usually reserved for movie idols.

Dixie was thrilled at Bing’s progress but distraught at the state of their marriage. In the two months since she returned from New York, Dixie exhausted herself trying to keep up with his nightlife while doing justice to her own career. On March 4, two days after the “Thanks to You” session, she announced her intention to file for divorce. “We have been married only about six months,” she told an Associated Press reporter, “but we have already found out that we are not suited to each other. Our separation is an amicable one, and the only reason for it is that we just can’t get along.” ⁵²Amicable it was, for the simple reason that she neglected to inform Bing, who learned she was charging mental cruelty when Everett phoned to read him the newspaper account. Dixie vanished and Bing didn’t know her whereabouts for ten days, until a friend persuaded her to call him from her hideout in Agua Caliente.

Bing had been drinking and carousing again, but that was not the primary issue for Dixie. The intolerable thing was that she never saw him. At first she traipsed about with him every night, staying late at the Grove and then moving on to the Cotton Club and other places, overimbibing and not much enjoying it. Dixie was nineteen and wanted her husband, not the party swirling around him. Sue Carol and others at Fox noticed how exhausted she looked. Dixie, realizing she could not live both of their lives, made an agreement with Bing: he would not go to her job, and she would not go to his. They would meet on weekends. But Bing often preferred to spend that time playing golf or baseball. There were nights he stayed out till the small hours while she waited up, a nervous wreck, taking one drink and then another in the vain hope of getting to sleep. Another source of contention was his gambling, an unlikely habit for a man later known for his financial prudence, but one that in those years consumed his income.

Putting aside his fear of flying, Bing chartered a single-engine plane and headed for the Mexican playground where they had spent weekends at the track and casino. ⁵³ Dixie was amazed that he was willing to board such a contraption and was moved by his entreaties. But she was now in the catbird seat and made a fateful bargain, demanding that he quit drinking and take control of his life. The Agua Caliente pact became part of Crosby family lore. According to Bob Crosby, Dixie made Bing’s career possible when she weaned him off alcohol. Yet the weaning was a two-year process, and at the end of that time Dixie would be fighting her own battle with booze. Bob conceded the devastating impact her drinking had on her health and her relationship with Bing, but steadfastly maintained, “It was to me one of the finest marriages that I have ever seen…. You couldn’t escape feeling the love between the two of them.” ⁵⁴

It is difficult to contemplate their disenchanted marriage, which caused much misery even as it was universally acclaimed as idyllic, without disquiet. Yet it is no less difficult to imagine their not marrying, considering how forceful Dixie was in turning Bing around and how large a role their mythic romance played in the public imagination. As Bing’s star rose and Dixie’s dimmed, rumors spread of her sacrifice. By the 1940s the hearsay gained traction when reports of their troubled marriage made the gossip columns and Walter Wanger produced a picture allegedly based on Dixie’s plight (Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman, 1947). Bing considered bringing suit, but his attorney correctly pointed out that the public would never connect the film to him and Dixie unless he publicized his outrage. For even then, the Crosbys were popularly known as a model couple.

The public was not entirely deceived. Dixie was crazy about Bing, whom she privately called Angel. Her dramatic getaway had apparently been an attempt to save the marriage; she never filed suit and the place she ran to — a resort Bing loved, where they had shared happy times — suggested her hope for a honeymoon furlough. Dixie later said she asked Bing if he wanted her back because he could not countenance divorce. He assured her that as they were married only six months, it would not have been “much of a megillah to get it annulled.” ⁵⁵ Agua Caliente was their chance for a clean break, and they didn’t take it. The papers announced their reconciliation on March 15.

Bing promised to reform and, despite several slips during the next couple of years, so successfully took control of his drinking problem that it all but disappeared. Until this point, his story threatened to turn into a prototype for the plight of music’s slow suicides: from Bix Beiderbecke and Charlie Parker to Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. But Bing’s tale took a radical turn. He would achieve a complete personal reversal, exercising jurisdiction over every minute of his day. If Prohibition found him exploring the lower depths, as he had as a child, working before dawn at the Everyman’s Club, the Depression would help him to reassert the rectitude he had exhibited on those same mornings at mass. Instead of joining the ranks of defiant young artists who crash prosperity’s gate only to be undone by its rewards, he would learn to savor — with disarming modesty — the public’s adoration and the privileges of power. As the Depression deepened, he would become a standard-bearer for community and survival.

As a result, most of Bing’s friends endorsed his belief that — unlike Dixie and his sons — he was never truly alcoholic, because true alcoholics do not remain casual drinkers, as Bing did, nursing a scotch for hours or enjoying an occasional blowout with no disruptive effects. They chalked up his hell-raising days to the culture of Prohibition and paraphrased Saint Augustine’s reflection “Our real pleasure was simply in doing something that was not allowed.” ⁵⁶ Yet Bing had displayed undeniable symptoms of clinical alcoholism — blackouts and binges and self-destructive conduct. In time, the years 1927-31 would represent to him the abandoned period of his wildness, an alcoholic maze that devoured one Bing Crosby and delivered another. Dixie’s decree inaugurated his transformation. Yet like many who possess a genius for self-control, Bing was impatient with those who did not.