16

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME?

He would sing at the drop of a hat. He would sing all the time. He’d sing when he was riding a bicycle, he’d sing when he was walking down the street, he’d sing on a train — he had a singing habit.

— Rosemary Clooney ( 1991 ) ¹

Launched by The Big Broadcast, Bing Crosby’s career soared in a steady arc, a trajectory ascending with greater velocity every year until, at its late-1940s pinnacle, he would be transformed from an actor-singer-star into an incontestable national icon, a match for motherhood, apple pie, and baseball. Pundits would resort to epic encomiums, saluting him, not untypically, as “the first of the Universal Common Men.” ² Even before then, the adulation was such that, in the recollection of his eldest son, it blurred the boundaries between “God and dad, because everybody revered both of them.” Looking back at his early childhood, Gary Crosby recalled, “People crossing streets, running up to the side of the car, or, if I was in some place, coming over and kneeling in front of me to tell me what a wonderful man he was and what a thrill it must be to be his son, and how they loved him so much, and he had done so much for them, and his singing was so great, and it went on and on and on, the way people spoke about God.” ³

Before a society invests its dreams in an individual, particularly one without military power, it must detect in him the exemplary tribal disposition. Bing was quintessentially American, cool and upbeat, never pompous, belligerent, or saccharine, never smug or superior. He looked down on no one and up to no one. In an age when other nations invested everything in despots, America could feel proud not only of Bing but of its pride in Bing.

The transformation was gradual and largely unforeseeable, ultimately tethering Bing and the country in a pact neither could afford to break. Having left his wildness behind him and having attained prosperity far beyond that of Whiteman or the “ancient king” of his high-school reverie, Bing was able to mine a magical perquisite of old Hollywood, the power to remake oneself. He was free to choose and reject aspects of his past, or images from his imagination, to concoct the better man he resolved to be. In Hollywood, shopgirls became queens, cowards warriors, gay men Don Juans, scoundrels gentlemen, and gentlemen mugs. Bing created the most astute role of the era, and he played it exceedingly well for forty-five years — never more engagingly than during the 1930s, when his metamorphosis was fresh and providential. During Prohibition he had been a drunk. During the Depression he became, FDR-like, an aristocrat of the people: a North Star of stability, decency, and optimism.

Yet while he allowed the Paramount publicity department and brother Larry to reinvent him in a blizzard of press handouts, he found the conversion from entertainer to secular priest disturbing. It violated his sense of irony and modesty. “That modesty is real, realer than anybody understood,” Barry Ulanov, his first biographer, would later reflect. “Quite apart from faith, in the sense of something you believe in and follow, he had in his education an introduction to some of the greatest thinkers the world has ever known — tough, philosophical minds.” In short, Ulanov argued, he was too well educated not to be modest. “Audiences felt that about him,” he continued, “and didn’t feel envious — they didn’t feel this guy should not have so much talent, success, and money. I never heard that, not once. Audiences were knocked out by him because they recognized in him a person who did not exaggerate his skills, who even had doubts about those skills.” ⁴ The taller he stood, the more Crosby ducked flattery. “He is a very odd individual,” wrote Adolph Zukor of the man who rescued his movie empire from insolvency. “He doesn’t like to listen to praise. He likes to listen to criticism.”

Modesty sobered his ambition without weakening it. Though Bing insisted he was a mildly talented, profoundly lucky entertainer (never an artist), he did not turn to Providence to guide his career; he relied on hard work and astute, obstinate bargaining. Bing had reason to credit his success to the help and advice of others, yet he was the one who pulled the strings in forging an entertainment corporation without precedent. If Bing was disinclined to make claims for his gifts, he wagered aggressively on his market value. His reputation for knowing his own mind grew in the early 1930s as he played simultaneous career chess with the bosses of movies, records, and radio, casually moving his pieces until one opponent after another conceded defeat.

He knew that however much he might enrich himself, he could only enrich his masters more. As they accepted the unassailable logic of his position, they lined up for a piece of the action. The emerging house of Crosby served as a template for subsequent entertainers who gambled on the same trifecta: first recordings, then radio or television, finally Hollywood. Only Frank Sinatra in the forties, Elvis Presley in the fifties, and Barbra Streisand in the sixties, each working the Crosby strategy, came within hailing distance of his success — though a great many others tried — and only Bing and, to a far lesser degree, Sinatra enjoyed a consistently successful broadcasting career, as opposed to specials and guest appearances. But career statistics tell only a part of the story. No other pop icon has ever been so thoroughly, lovingly liked — liked and trusted. Bing’s naturalness made him credible to all, regardless of region, religion, race, or gender. He was our most authentic chameleon, mirroring successive eras — through Prohibition, depression, war, anxiety, and affluence — without ever being dramatic about it. He was discreet and steady. He was family.

His later success on all fronts was so profound, it is difficult to believe that in 1932, while Paramount was preparing to launch him as a major film star, Bing thought he might be washed up on the air. His association with CBS had soured — perhaps, he feared, for good. After Cremo canceled him and he returned to Los Angeles, Bing continued to appear for CBS on a sustaining show that paid him no salary except for a default guarantee of $400, should he not have a theatrical job in any given week. CBS was motivated to make certain he did, not only to save the fee but because the network booked his vaudeville appearances for a 10 percent commission. As if those terms weren’t invidious enough, CBS asked Bing (and other artists) to accept a 15 percent cut in June, promising a raise when his contract was renewed. He agreed, only to learn on July 15, when the old contract expired, that CBS demanded an additional cut of 20 percent, reducing his default payments to $250. Again he consented, waiving the promised raise and taking the 20 percent cut. But when the new contract arrived on July 18, two weeks into the production of The Big Broadcast, he discovered that CBS’s artists bureau had increased its commission for his concert performances. CBS was treating him like a mark. That evening, an hour before his broadcast, Crosby informed the network’s New York office that he would not appear. A week later he casually announced that when the picture wrapped, he would take off for the Mexican coast on a fishing trip. ⁵

But Bing was less confident than he sounded. He postponed the fishing excursion two weeks and appeared free of charge on California Melodies, an evening series on the CBS affiliate, KHJ. In Variety’s interpretation, Bing was “giving his services gratis once a week… to show that CBS can’t do without him.” ⁶ Ev flew to New York, assuring him that the free broadcasts were having a softening effect. Bing left for his vacation in mid-August and spent two weeks cruising Mexico’s waters, deep-sea fishing with Eddie Lang, Lennie Hayton, and actors Lew Ayres and Nick Stuart, returning with an ill-suited if symbolically carefree mustache. When he learned that CBS would not budge, he refused to broadcast until a sponsor was contracted. Not an easy task. The public may have been clamoring for Bing, but the Depression had advertisers anxious and uncertain.

Meanwhile, his theatrical appearances drew capacity crowds in Oakland, Los Angeles, Glendale, Pasadena, Riverside, Pomona, and San Bernardino. He broke Jolson’s house record at San Francisco’s Fox Theater, taking in $40,000 for the week. On September 16, the day after he closed at the Fox, Bing recorded for the first time since May. “Please” was timed for the premiere of The Big Broadcast, and its punning lyric shaped a melody that ideally suited Bing’s style. Whole notes at the beginning and end of the leading phrase (“Please lend your little ear to my pleas”) showcase Bing’s beseeching timbre, the first generating a hiccupy mordent and dramatic entrance. Bing’s record, with Anson Weeks’s band and Lang’s guitar, was an enormous success, topping sales charts in November and December — an early example of marketing synergy between movies, records, and radio. Paramount adopted “Please” as the title for a Crosby two-reeler and required him to reprise it in his second feature film, College Humor. The song remained a staple of his career: He re-recorded it in 1940, scoring a second hit, and parodied it nearly twenty years after that for a TV skit in which his sons instruct him in rock ‘n’ roll, turning the mordent into a Presleyan split vowel (“pli-ease”). One young listener who discovered the song in those years was John Lennon, who credited it as the inspiration for the Beatles’ “Please Please Me.”

Those successes worked in Everett’s favor as he labored to put Bing back on radio. Working against him, in addition to his brother’s increasing reputation for willfulness after the CBS walkout, was corporate suspicion (perhaps mixed with desire) that the rage for Crosby, though heating up, might fizzle out. Under the circumstances, no one knew for sure if Everett’s formidable asking price was high or reasonable or, just possibly, low.

The most powerful of advertisers was the tobacco industry, which shamelessly marketed cigarettes with the flapdoodle once lavished on snake oil. The carnage wrought by tobacco was first noticed in the early 1930s, with the increase in lung cancer; in 1932 the American Journal of Cancertraced the disease directly to cigarette tar. Cigarettes had been tagged coffin nails long before the turn of the century, but those imprecations were often dismissed as puritanical caution against anything pleasurable. Big tobacco, with a pleasurably addictive product and infinite funds, blithely promised better digestion, weight control, and improved speaking and singing abilities. Camel urged a regimen of five cigarettes at Thanksgiving dinner, one after each course; Lucky Strike claimed support from “20,679 Physicians.” ⁷ Everett opened negotiations with Chesterfield.

Bing and Dixie left for New York on October 5, arriving as “Please” began topping sales lists everywhere. They lived in New York for the next five and a half months, until filming began on College Humor. While Everett worked to nail down a sponsor, Bing secured himself a new agent at Mills-Rockwell, the powerful musical concern whose client list included Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, the Mills Brothers, Glen Gray, Don Redman, and Victor Young. An offshoot of the Rockwell-O’Keefe Theatrical Agency, it was run by Irving Mills, Tommy Rockwell, and Cork O’Keefe, who lined up November concert bookings as Everett hammered away at Chesterfield and Bing enjoyed weeks of suspenseful leisure.

October 14 was a memorable day. It began with Bing recording three songs: “Here Lies Love” from the picture, as well as two songs he established as standards, Irving Berlin’s “How Deep Is the Ocean?,” and his collaboration with Victor Young and lyricist Ned Washington, “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You.” ⁸ Within hours The Big Broadcast began its run at the Paramount, establishing him at last as a Hollywood player. In the evening, while shmoozing on the street near the Friars Club, Bing was introduced to Bob Hope, a fast-talking comic and vaudevillian then appearing on Rudy Vallées radio show and on Broadway in Ballyhoo of 1932. Bing’s friendliness surprised and gratified Hope. They were the same age; Bing was twenty-six days older, though his purported 1904 birthdate convinced Bob that he was himself the older man. ⁹ But Bing’s career had advanced well beyond that of Hope’s. Six weeks later they shared a bill at the Capitol Theater, with Bing headlining and Bob (Ballyhoo of 1932 had flopped) as emcee.

The Capitol engagement lasted only a week, December 2-8, but that was long enough for Bing and Hope to dream up routines that emerged as unexpected highlights on a workaday bill with comic acrobats, radio impressionists, and the Abe Lyman band. “I did an act, you know, impressions,” Hope recalled, “and so I talked Bing into doing it at the Capitol and it just played like gangbusters. We’d play two politicians meeting in the street and we’d say hi, hi, and then we’d go into each others’ pockets, or two conductors who end up dueling with their batons, and it went over so big — stuff they really laughed at.” ¹⁰ Their chemistry blossomed between shows at a nearby saloon, O’Reilly’s, where the two traded show-business tales and quips and made each other laugh. Bing, a model audience for anyone he thought funny, flourished in the presence of gifted performers, and Hope admired his confidence, speed, and ease — his willingness to try new things. “Bing’s career was doing pretty good, coming along,” Bob said, “but he was just the same then as he always was, a good straight-ahead guy.” ¹¹

Reviewers who caught only the first day’s shows missed out. Variety praised “Bu-bu-bu-Bing” for his “baritoning” and lauded Lang as “a guitarist whose swell strumming detracts at first but eventually helps out the Crosby singing,” ignoring the rest of the bill. ¹² The New York Herald Tribunecheered Bing for a “merry return, combining songs and comedy in a pleasing act” and added that Hope’s material was old but effective. ¹³ No one wrote of the Crosby-Hope interplay, but Bob’s brother returned with a (silent) movie camera and captured their infectious energy. Hope broke big the next year, playing a lead in Jerome Kern’s Roberta, six years before making his first movie with Bing.

After months of dickering, Chesterfield signed Bing to a thirteen-week contract, two CBS broadcasts per week at $2,000, beginning January 4, 1933, with Lennie Hayton conducting. Chesterfield initially offered the show to NBC, which Bing tried to interest in creating a broadcasting outlet in San Francisco, permitting him more time to make movies. NBC seemed sympathetic, but those talks ended when Lucky Strike, an NBC sponsor, objected to a rival cigarette company’s being represented on the network. Chesterfield knew the feeling: it had stalled sealing Bing’s contract on the grounds that his Cremo connection was too fresh in the public mind. ¹⁴ Chesterfield decided seven months was an appropriate buffer to rid Bing of the Cremo taint.

For Bing, who smoked cigarettes when he did not have a pipe, the Chesterfield deal marked the beginning of an on-and-mostly-off relationship that lasted twenty years, producing two radio shows, The Music That Satisfies (January-April 1933) and The Bing Crosby Show (1949-52) and several print campaigns. The association troubled him and his mother, who badgered him not to shill for tobacco. But Chesterfield had given him what he considered a badly needed break, and he maintained the affiliation partly out of loyalty. Even so, he refused to be shown in print ads with a cigarette in his mouth, especially after a magazine ran an ad in which the art director had penciled one in. In a 1944 ad he neatly avoids the product altogether. Pictured at a desk, its open drawer overflowing with cigarette cartons, an improbably well-dressed Bing reflects, “There’s no friend like an old friend and that’s how I’ve felt about Chesterfield ever since I first sang for them several years ago.” ¹⁵

As soon as the radio deal was signed, Paramount — its executives flaunting the success of The Big Broadcast while fighting off creditors — announced that College Humor would go before the cameras in April, after the Chesterfield show ended. The studio was treading water, chaotically. Until 1931, when ticket sales sharply declined, Paramount had ignored the Depression, acquiring new theaters, a music division, and massive debt. Now the studio filed for bankruptcy, and in the course of a bitter restructuring, two of Hollywood’s pioneers, Jesse Lasky and B. P. Schulberg, were forced out. Adolph Zukor, whose extravagant policies helped put the company in jeopardy, was appointed chairman of the board, a face-saving charade to camouflage his removal from the seat of power. A lot was riding on Bing.

Crosby, too, had avoided facing the Depression in his work. But in the months before he launched The Music That Satisfies and during the weeks it aired, he resumed a prolific recording schedule. At an early-morning session on October 25, he addressed the Depression musically for the first time. Two of the three planned songs were negligible items by Harry Woods (whose “Side by Side” had done well for the Rhythm Boys). With Hayton conducting an ensemble of five winds, four strings, and rhythm, Bing began with a firm reading of “Linger a Little Longer in the Twilight,” extending to his mate a promise to “dream our cares away,” then whistling like a chirpy bird. “We’re a Couple of Soldiers” is a maudlin muddle about combating hardship with patriotic diligence: “Trouble and hard luck we face with a grin / Like regular soldiers we never give in.” Hayton’s arrangement begins with marching brasses, and as Bing sings the second chorus, a slight flutter suggests he might crack up, which is precisely what happened on the second take, the first of the semilegendary Crosby breakdowns, known for his quick-witted and off-color ad-libs. Bing sings with authority for more than two minutes, until Eddie Lang waffles an arpeggio that Tommy Dorsey critiques in an extended raspberry, convulsing the singer. What makes the ensuing minute hilarious is Bing’s and the band’s insistence on completing the take as he steadies himself for a measure or two and then cracks up again. At the coda, he ad-libs: “We’re a couple of nances, Uncle Salvi and me. Station house!” Nance is period slang for a homosexual; Uncle Salvi is Eddie Lang (born Salvatore Massaro); the station house is showbiz overstatement for the fate of performing truants.

The session grew suddenly serious for the next selection, a song from a new Broadway revue, Americana, with a melody by Jay Gorney and an emphatic lyric by E. Y. (“Yip”) Harburg. ¹⁶ Instead of tritemetaphors, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” paints vivid images of veterans (“half a million boots went slogging through hell”), laborers, and farmers who believed they were “building a dream,” only to find themselves destitute and forgotten. Bing recorded his version three weeks after Americana opened. Brunswick rushed the platter to stores, and within two weeks it was the best-selling record in the nation — the one Tin Pan Alley hit that addressed the darkness in American life. Columbia quickly issued a version by Rudy Vallée that begins with a spoken introduction (he describes the song as “poignant and different”), ¹⁷ and Jolson sang it on his radio show. But other versions pale beside Bing’s, a perfectly pitched statement of protest and empathy, dignified but not somber, rueful but not bitter, heroic but not overwrought. As Studs Terkel would later note, he “understates [the song] beautifully,” all the better to allow the words to “explode.” ¹⁸ Bing’s record emerged as an emblem of the era. ¹⁹

After Bing recorded his single perfect take of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” emotions ran high in the studio, and Bing’s way of diffusing them was to swing some jazz. Lennie Hayton was supposed to conclude the session with a couple of piano solos, but he never got around to them. Instead, Bing instigated a duet with him on Victor Young’s first hit, recently revived by the Mills Brothers, “Sweet Sue — Just You.” The rollicking result is in some respects as stunning as the number that preceded it, though it remained a secret for thirty-five years. Bing and Lennie claimed the tune in a loose treatment that begins with stride piano in the style of Fats Waller. Bing enters cocksure, coolly exchanging phrases with Lennie and deftly interpolating — in his scat chorus — a passage from the solo Bix Beider becke played on an otherwise bombastic 1928 recording by Paul Whiteman. ²⁰ He is bright and moving, as if tempered by the Depression song. Yet Kapp rejected “Sweet Sue,” which did not see the light of day until 1967.

Days before Bing’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” achieved instant prominence, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president. Though neither man was especially happy about it, Roosevelt and Crosby became associated in the public’s mind as twin forces against the unknown. Just as he had haplessly incarnated the excesses of Prohibition, Bing would emerge as a source of strength and community in that precarious era when parents dreaded the approach of Christmas, and bank robber John Dillinger commanded grudging admiration. There were those who longed for take-charge guys like they had in Europe — Mussolini, who made the trains run on time, and Hitler, soon to be appointed chancellor of Germany. From 1929 Studebaker marketed an automobile called The Dictator. But most sought the reassurance FDR inspired as a man of the people, no matter how highborn, and the reassurance they found in Crosby, an entertainer of the people, a straight shooter and good guy, with a voice as resonant and natural as every Joe imagined he produced in the shower and as chivalrous as every Jane imagined of her heart’s desire. Bing, approaching thirty, had no real competition for the job. In the sound of his voice, people knew who they were and where they stood. ²¹

After vacationing with Dixie in Miami Beach and playing a week at a theater in Baltimore, Bing debuted his Chesterfield series on January 4, 1933; he was on twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays, from 9:00 to 9:15. Arguing that listeners might be tired of “Where the Blue of the Night” and wanting to purge memories of his previous affiliation, Bing’s sponsor urged him to change his theme, so for a short while he used “Just an Echo in the Valley,” one of his sappier records, which consequently became a major hit. Once again Bing was prohibited from speaking on air; Norman Brokenshire did the announcing. On the first broadcast he sang “Please,” “Love Me Tonight,” “How Deep Is the Ocean?,” and, because of time constraints, half of “Echo in the Valley.” Hayton conducted an instrumental number. Variety found it “highly palatable stuff if not particularly distinguished. Crosby and Hayton are both adept but the presentation is quite formula.” ²² The announcer was criticized for his “rather saccharine overly benign wordage.” Radio fans had no such reservations. In February the show ranked ninth in Variety’s nationwide survey, and in a poll limited to singers, Bing ranked first, trailed by Vallée, Downey, and Columbo. ²³

He continued to pack them in at theaters as well. Irving Mills negotiated an impressive $3,000 for a week at the Albee in Brooklyn (he shared the bill with vaudeville legends Weber and Fields). In March Bing returned to the Capitol Theater to share a bill with Eddy Duchin’s band and Milton Berle, who relished the marquee — BERLE DUCHIN CROSBY— though, in fact, Bing hijacked the audience, performing numerous encores and clowning with the comedian for the finale. ²⁴

It is tempting to imagine that every time Bing stepped out on a stage in 1933, his last year as a concert performer until 1975, aspiring singers experienced jolts of recognition. Within ten years the pop-music terrain would be crowded with his musical offspring — among them Perry Como, Dick Todd, Herb Jeffries, Bob Eberle, Buddy Clark, Andy Russell, Bob Carroll, Dick Haymes, Bob Stewart, and Tony Martin, who remembered, “We all loved to sing like Bing — to listen to Bing was taking lessons.” ²⁵ In the same period, Bing’s influence reached country singers like Jimmy Wakely, Roy Rogers, and Eddie Arnold, and European singers like Paris’s Jean Sablon or London’s Jack Cooper, Denny Dennis, and Sam Costa, who noted, “All the singers tried to be Crosbys. You were either a high Crosby or a low Crosby.” ²⁶ Even Count Basie’s majestic blues shouter Jimmy Rushing revised his style after hearing Bing. Rushing, who named Bing, Louis Armstrong, and Ethel Waters as his favorites, was “a high Crosby,” according to Costa’s formulation. ²⁷ The finest “low Crosby” was Billy Eckstine, who covered numerous Crosby hits and bred a generation of bass-baritones known among musicians as the Black Bings. ²⁸

Yet none of those singers, however popular or distinctive, provided Crosby with any real competition. Only one singer challenged him. Right before Bing played the Capitol, he and Eddie Lang worked a week at Jersey City’s Journal Square Theater. In attendance, with his girlfriend and future wife, Nancy Barbato, was seventeen-year-old Frank Sinatra, who credited Bing’s performance that day with his own decision to embark on a musical career. Sinatra set out to fulfill his ambition immediately; by 1934 he was singing with the Hoboken Four, with whom he auditioned for Major Bowes and his Original Amateur Hour. One of the quartet’s numbers was an imitation of the Crosby-Mills Brothers record, “Shine.”

Despite his tremendous impact, Crosby was going through a transitional period, as he attempted to jettison mannerisms in favor of a more level, straightforward, speechlike approach. At the same time, he was helping define the American songbook by introducing a batch of important new tunes. For Sinatra, Bing’s 1933 recordings provided a trove of durable material as well as a guide to vocal devices he could use, reject, or revise. Consider Bing’s hit record of “Street of Dreams,” with its ominous lyric by Sam Lewis and dramatically ascending melody by Victor Young. ²⁹ Bing begins with a dark rendition of the verse, establishing the theme of opium-induced dreams; stresses the first chorus with mordents; and, inspired by Tommy Dorsey’s breathless chorus (thirty-two bars without a rest), demonstrates his skillful phrasing in the finale as he glides without a pause into and out of the release. Sinatra, nine years later, discarded the sinister verse as well as Bing’s fluttery mordents but retained the breathless phrasing, meticulous enunciation, and feeling for the song’s drama.

If Sinatra thought Bing’s 1933 records dated, Bing himself seems to have chafed at the pedestrian arrangements. In “Try a Little Tenderness,” a love song peculiarly germane to the Depression (“women do get weary / wearing the same shabby dress”), he spurs the sluggish tempo with adornments like the unexpected high note on happiNESS. In a recording with Guy Lombardo of “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” he counters the band’s hopelessly rigid inflections with his own infallible rhythmic pulse and caps his first chorus with a blues locution. Surprisingly, Lombardo’s clipped brasses, buttered reeds, and staccato rhythms propel Bing (much as Lombardo-style arrangements had roused Louis Armstrong to fanciful flights a couple of years earlier). Bing’s embellishments are relatively mild, but his time is vigorous, particularly on “You’re Beautiful Tonight, My Dear,” a second-rate song made unaccountably affecting in his sure interpretation. His buoyant scat solo and reprise on “Young and Healthy” are insurgent statements of self in the face of Lombardo’s stuffy rectitude. “Young and Healthy” and “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” both from 42nd Street, were combined on a platter that topped sales charts twice within a month — first one side, then the flip.

For Bing’s next sessions, Kapp returned him to the arms of old friends, but despite Bing’s evident enthusiasm, the results are uneven. Lennie Hayton backed him with a crew that included Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, trumpeter Sterling Bose, and forgotten drummer Stan King, who knew how to drive home an out-chorus, as on “I’ve Got the World on a String.” Yet the session’s highlight turned out to be the last record by Bing and the Mills Brothers, “My Honey’s Lovin’Arms.” Bing vigorously romps the first chorus, the brothers imitate instruments in the second, and Bing ad-libs against the scrim of their harmonies in the third. This savory performance boasts a rapid-fire in-joke that Crosby expert Fred Reynolds has noticed: in the third chorus (of take A), Bing does an easily overlooked but unmistakable Jolson imitation on the line “I know that I belong.” Bing’s teaming with the Mills Brothers had been initiated by the singers, not Kapp, and from now on it would continue only on the radio.

A couple of weeks later, with four violins added to the mix, Bing covered Ruth Etting’s hit “You’ve Got Me Crying Again” and gave his all to the Depression tearjerker “What Do I Care, It’s Home,” almost overcoming Roy Turk’s quatrain: “It’s a weathered shanty / On a barren mountainside /You may think it’s rough / But mom and I are satisfied.” The material was marginally better at a session with the Dorsey Brothers, for which Bing played a supporting role, singing single choruses as he had in his Whiteman days. Two faux-preacher numbers, “Stay on the Right Side of the Road” and “Someone Stole Gabriel’s Horn,” elicit his asides in southern dialect. Yet Bing and the band — including the masterly trumpet player Bunny Berigan — grill the smart, energetic arrangements to a turn.

On nearly all his recordings, at his radio broadcasts, and in theaters, Bing was backed by Eddie Lang, sitting at his right elbow, sharing a microphone, steadying him with strummed chords, leading him with calculated arpeggios, pacing him with a lissome yet resolute accompaniment. He “just made you feel like you wanted to ride and go,” Bing said. ³⁰ They looked out for each other on- and offstage. “Eddie had everything to do with the radio show,” said Barry Ulanov, “but he also took a great deal of responsibility for Bing as a person, Bing as a singer, Bing as someone who could be a front man for the music that Lang loved.” ³¹ In return, Bing stipulated that Paramount include Eddie in all his projects, specifically guaranteeing him a speaking role in College Humor. Lang’s Paramount contract, netting him $15,000 per Crosby picture plus a salary of $1,000 a week while touring, made him the highest-paid sideman in the country.

Eddie was apprehensive about his part in College Humor. He was suffering from chronic and painful laryngitis and worried that he might not be up to it. Bing encouraged him to have his tonsils removed, and the doctor assured Eddie that a tonsillectomy was a safe and simple procedure. The operation was scheduled for Sunday morning, March 26, at ten, so that Eddie would be able to leave for the Coast with Bing on Wednesday. A few days earlier Dixie had asked Kitty Lang to join her and Sue Carol on a steamship voyage that would take them to California via stops in Bermuda and Cuba. Kitty wanted to go but told Dixie that she could not leave Eddie during the operation and would travel by train with the boys. As he was wheeled into the elevator, Eddie asked her to buy a racing form so he could pick her a winner on Monday.

When Eddie came out of surgery, the doctor told Kitty he was fine but heavily sedated and suggested she go home. She refused, and remained by his bed for hours with a racing form in her lap, comforted by a nurse who told her that patients often slept that long. At 5:00 P.M., the nurse took his pulse and raced from the room. An oxygen machine was wheeled in, but he had hemorrhaged and it was too late. “I must have screamed, for I remember hearing a child start screaming, too, and realized that it was someone down the hall and that I must not frighten this child,” Kitty recalled. A doctor gave her an injection, and she felt her throat constrict until she could not speak. “Someone must have called Bing on the phone, he was at the Friars Club. Needless to say, he came right over and into the waiting room. He fell on his knees with his head in my lap and started to sob, ‘Kitty, he was my best friend.’ “ ³²

When the news was announced, the radio networks observed a minute of silence for the luminous twenty-nine-year-old musician who more than anyone else invented jazz guitar in the era before Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. Kitty waived the autopsy, and Eddie’s brother Tom made arrangements to send the body home to Philadelphia, where friends and relatives filled the family home. Eddie’s father, who had built him his first instrument out of a cigar box and thread, paced the floor for days while Kitty sat in a trance. She lost thirty pounds. “I remember someone touching my shoulder and telling me that Bing had arrived to take me to the funeral. Poor dear Bing, my heart went out to this great man who was sitting on top of the world as the greatest singer the world had ever known, and yet he lost the one companion who had been instrumental in putting him there.” ³³

The service was hell for Bing, his first taste of the madness of celebrity. He was accustomed to autograph seekers in person and through letters; these he efficiently answered, usually plugging his current projects. But until now he had been mobbed only in The Big Broadcast, and that was for laughs. At Eddie’s service, people closed in on him and turned the ceremony into a circus. In their haste “just to touch him,” in Kitty’s words, they overturned pews and the appalled priest was forced to implore mourners to take their seats. Bing was already phobic about hospitals and funerals, but this was unendurable, an intrusion on his and the family’s grief, and he resolved never to let it happen again. A welterweight named Marty Collins volunteered to protect Bing, who was impressed with his manner and effectiveness. Afterward, when Bing and Kitty had a moment alone, he asked her to Los Angeles to stay with him and Dixie, promising her a home as long as she wanted. Dixie had become pregnant during filming of The Big Broadcast and was expecting in June. They needed her, he said. Kitty joined them in April, and Bing looked out for her all his life. But a part of Bing died with Eddie, and he never allowed anyone else to get as close.

Bing’s public statements were typically reserved, mostly mourning the loss of Eddie’s talent. He elaborated a little in 1939, writing that Eddie “had good sense and saved me from many a jam. And I don’t mean music session. Naturally, when I got into a musical solo spot, it was a great comfort to have such an artist with me. Eddie made me do my best when the break came, and I give him full credit.” ³⁴ Mutual friends were astonished by Bing’s seeming lack of emotion. Only a few intimates were allowed to see how tortured he was by Eddie’s passing, having advised him to undergo the operation. “Joe Venuti confirmed he was absolutely wrecked,” Barry Ulanov said, “and I don’t think he was capable of that kind of attachment again.” ³⁵ In his 1948 biography, Ulanov suggests that Lang’s death hastened Bing’s retreat from jazz. But surely the influence of Jack Kapp and the obligations of stardom would have channeled him into the mainstream with or without Eddie. Bing’s recordings had long reflected his inclination to move in and out of jazz, and as Ulanov wrote, his jazz style “might have proved too strong for complete public acceptance.” ³⁶ Yet in Eddie Lang, he had a partner on- and offstage, a trusted friend with the same musical moorings, the same attitudes, the same rhythmic pulse.

Bing tracked down Dixie in the Caribbean and phoned her to ease the shock of Eddie’s death. When Dixie, Sue, and Everett’s wife, Naomi (who took Kitty’s place on the voyage), arrived in Hollywood, Dixie moved in with Sue. Bing followed on the Santa Fe Chief, traveling with Mary Pickford, the eternal waif of silent pictures and a loyal Crosby fan; her companion, Countess DiFrasso (American heiress Dorothy Taylor, subsequently an escort of mobster Bugsy Siegel); and Sue’s husband, Nick Stuart. Dixie greeted them at the Pasadena station. Bing and Dixie moved in with Sue and Nick and then rented the Stuarts’ home while they traveled. With Paramount paying the musician and line charges, Bing was able to complete his Chesterfield contract on the West Coast. Paramount wanted as much of Bing as it could get. A couple of weeks into College Humor, the studio prepared him with a new script (Too Much Harmony), to go into production almost immediately. It also announced plans to feature Bing in a musical version of a stage play Cloudy with Showers (never made) and a series of two-reel shorts, all of which reinforced his decision to go Hollywood for good.

In anticipation of their first child, the Crosbys began to build their first real home, at 4326 Forman Avenue in the Toluca Lake area. Dixie’s dad, Evan Wyatt, supervised the construction, which included a miniature balcony off the front hallway. At a party, actor Jack Oakie asked Wyatt its purpose and was told, “That’s so Bing can sing to his guests as they arrive.” ³⁷

Paramount requested Bing to fill out a publicity questionnaire. This time Bing and not Everett provided the answers. Eleven years later Ed Sullivan discovered the form in his files and published it in his syndicated column. ³⁸ It is an illuminating portrait of Bing and the period. Bing gave his New York address (160 West Fifty-ninth Street) as home, his name as Harry Lillis Crosby Jr., and his childhood ambition “to be an actor.” His favorite fictional heroes: Robin Hood, Robinson Crusoe, François Villon. ^* Real-life hero: Theodore Roosevelt. First radio job: with AI Rinker on KFI, Los Angeles, 1927. First childhood job: selling the Saturday Evening Post. Married: Dixie Lee. No children. Five outstanding figures in history: Jesus, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Napoleon, Disraeli, Lincoln. Outstanding figures of 1933: in sports, Babe Ruth; in theater, John Barrymore; in literature, Shaw; in music, Ravel; in politics, Mussolini. Favorite stage actors: Alfred Lunt, Katharine Cornell. Film actors: Helen Hayes, Lee Tracy. Radio artists: Burns and Allen. Comedian: Jimmy Durante. Dish: Lobster diavolo. Flower: gardenia. Jewel: diamond. Axiom: Take it easy. Least favorite color: lavender.

Of which compliments was he most proud?: “Ring Lardner wrote me, saying he was glad I was returning to the air. My wife generally comments favorably on my efforts and my dad maintains I sing better than Jolson. Coming from this unbiased source, I treasure this highly.” Favorite fan: “My mother, because she is very sincere and never hesitates to criticize when she figures criticism is due.” Did he ever fail to make a broadcast?: “On various occasions, while broadcasting in California, I found the thoroughbred delights of Caliente superior to the prospect of facing a mike.” How would he retire: “I would go nicely to California — buy a home, a boat, a car. I’d take up some light business (i.e., buy a piece of a prosperous business); travel abroad a bit; fish and golf in the interim, and visit the various racetracks. And raise a small family.” Good memory? “Quick memory, but retentive power bad.” Prompt for appointments?: “Yes, that is, lately.” Favorite expressions: “’Yeah, man,’ is one of them.” What broadcast of his own did he recall with the most pleasure? “Opening night on the Chesterfield program. After all hope had been abandoned, it was infinitely pleasurable after many months to get a break again.” Favorite song: “Sweet Sue.” Favorite classical number: “Prélude à l’apres-midi d’un faune.” Least favorite: “No dislike for anything musical, but Beethoven and Wagner leave me unresponsive.” Favorite books: Of Human Bondage, Point Counter Point, A Farewell to Arms, Round Up (Ring Lardner). Favorite poets: Keats, Browning, Shelley, Longfellow. Quotation: “’Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.” Eccentric? “In dress, tend slightly to the bizarre.” Hunches? “Sometimes I bet a hunch on a horse. A horse named Bingo won at Latonia and paid 40 to 1. Professionally, I don’t go by hunches.”

A year before Sullivan published those answers, humorist H. Allen Smith included a chapter on his attempt to research Bing’s life in his book Life in a Putty Knife Factory (1943). Allen excerpted a twenty four-page “bio-book” that Bing filled out at CBS in 1933, which restates and amplifies comments in the Paramount press book, for example, his response to “What would you do if you had a million dollars?” After observing that he would go to California and buy a prosperous business, fish, golf, visit the track, raise a small family, he continues:

If a million bucks ever came my way, I could doubtless distribute a considerable amount to relatives, etc., in loans, and still have enough to carry out the program described. I’m pretty socialistic in this connection and really don’t think anyone is entitled to or should have more than they need to live comfortably. My wants are comparatively simple and with half a million I could possibly scrape along somehow. In point of fact, if I ever connect with the aforesaid amount, I’ll wash up. ³⁹

Small wonder the CBS bio-book was suppressed! In addition to the familiar Crosby wit and verbiage, and the predictive limning of a character he would play in movies throughout the 1930s, Bing suggests he just might be the sort of wild-eyed usurer capable of pulling the lever for Norman Thomas.

College Humor took its title from the popular magazine that H. N. Swanson founded in 1920. Initially intended as a potpourri,of jokes, cartoons, and verses collected from undergraduate newspapers, it earned a reputation in the 1930s for launching talent; its contributors included S. J. Perelman and Philip Wylie. The jokes are now as antediluvian as those in Joe Miller’s Jests and not as funny, but they underscored a view of college as an interval consecrated to sex, puns, and football, much the same view propounded by Paramount in its rash of college movies, beginning with the Marx Brothers burlesque, HorseFeathers, and going downhill from there. As a genre, movies set in college peaked in the silent era, a time when Knute Rockne made higher education synonymous with football and Good News translated his Barnumesque hoopla to Broadway, inspiring enduring film parodies by Harold Lloyd (The Freshman) and Buster Keaton (College). Campus musicals (not dramas, as Paramount discovered with Confessions of a Co-ed) drew audiences throughout the 1930s and 1940s, disappeared in the 1950s, rallied in the 1960s as social protest movies, and resumed their more lunatic pedigrees in the frat house and slasher epics that followed.

The movie College Humor is maddeningly inane and dull, and would be no better remembered than College Rhythm, College Swing, or College Holiday if not for Crosby’s involvement. But it was a hit that validated the genre, produced three popular songs, and substantiated Bing’s box-office appeal. In the long run, the film proved of greater significance to Bing for professional associations that took root. Director Wesley Ruggles was sitting pretty with an Academy Award nomination for Cimarron when he was given the assignment, boosting its A-picture cachet. A former Keystone Kop and the director originally announced for King of Jazz, Ruggles was the first husband of actress Arline Judge, a friend and drinking companion of Dixie’s, later renowned for her front-page marital escapades. Ruggles’s association with Bing outlasted the marriage and led, in 1938, to Bing’s breakthrough performance in Sing You Sinners. Screenwriters Claude Binyon and Frank Butler separately went on to write more than a dozen of Bing’s most important films, including Sing You Sinners, Going My Way, Holiday Inn, and most of the Road pictures. Sam Coslow and Arthur Johnston, who wrote the score, had already given Bing “Just One More Chance” and would turn out several more of his signature hits. According to Coslow, College Humor was the “prize that every songsmith in the land coveted.” ⁴⁰

Most of the cast were pretty long in the tooth to play college students, but the atmosphere was convivial, especially for Bing and his pals Richard Arlen and Jack Oakie. Like Bing, Arlen was an expert swimmer and spirited carouser, but he grew intense and stiff in front of a camera — never more so than as the hulking, unshaven, hard-drinking football star who, after expulsion from school, turns painfully maudlin. As his roommate, Oakie, a gifted comic ham, endures a disturbingly violent initiation into the fraternity before replacing Arlen to win the big game. Oakie described a ritual required to make Bing starlike: the glued ears (“many’s the time Dick Arlen and I flipped those ears loose to get off early”) ⁴¹ and the donning of corset, padded shoulders, shoe lifts, and hairpiece. Oakie razzed him as “the robot of romance.” ⁴²

Bing, oddly enough, does not play a student (that would come a year later), but rather Professor Danvers of the drama department, a representative of the adult world, albeit one who teaches by singing and is swooned over by coeds, including Barbara Shirrel, Arlen’s girl and Oakie’s sister, played by the appealing Mary Carlisle. After defending Arlen against expulsion, Danvers loses his job and runs off with Barbara, becoming a successful crooner. “You can hear him but you can’t see him,” marvels Oakie, spooning with his girl to the car radio. Bing’s role was pumped into the script as an afterthought — it’s Oakie’s movie — and he doesn’t show up for reels at a time. He’s a one-man chorus in the first half, singing a few strains while the plot is tugged forward by the students. In the second half, he continues as a musical commentator while displaying world-class obtuseness about women, especially Barbara, whose infatuation (“He’s a swell egg,” she confides) provides him with the picture’s one memorable line. He has just been dismissed and is furiously packing his belongings when she walks in and asks him, “Do you mind if I take off my shoes?” He retorts, “I wouldn’t care if you took off your, ahh, shoes.”

Bing doesn’t exactly underact; he doesn’t do much acting at all. When he plays anger, his breathing seems rehearsed, and he’s little more than an extra during the big game. Still, while Oakie mugs like the devil to keep the film alive, Crosby and his husky easygoing voice steal it. The picture is a creaking antique, but Bing’s performance is attractive in a way that Oakie’s entertaining shtick and Arlen’s histrionic glowering are not. The best of his songs, “Learn to Croon,” is introduced as a classroom sing, with a Kate Smith lookalike delivering the line “just bu bu bu bu.” “Down the Old Ox Road,” which concerns a lovers’ lane and is expanded by a long recitative, caused controversy. As directed by Ruggles, it becomes, in Coslow’s opinion, “a sneaky bit of lyrical quasi-pornography.” ⁴³ Everyone can find the Ox Road, the production demonstrates, except three long-nosed virgins who wear glasses and oversize collars and are definitely out of place on a campus that thrives on sex and touchdowns. Burns and Allen are wasted as Scottish caterers.

The picture represented a break for Mary Carlisle, a twenty-year-old blonde with a provocative glint in her eye who was under contract to MGM but on perennial loan-out to Paramount for college movies. This was her biggest part to date, and Bing liked her well enough to cast her in two subsequent films, by which time he had the clout to approve his leading ladies. They became friends on the second film (Double or Nothing, 1937), but on the first he kept to himself, retiring to his dressing room as soon as he completed a scene and to the track or golf course at the end of the day. She admired his professionalism: “I worked with Lionel Barrymore and a lot of good actors, but Bing had something about him that was so natural, like Spencer Tracy. They were thinkers, very intelligent, and Bing was well read and terribly funny — he had a really marvelous vocabulary. He always knew his lines. It was always something else that went wrong in a scene, never Bing.” ⁴⁴

One morning, however, he appeared to revert to his old ways. “We had a big set with an orchestra,” Carlisle recalled, “and Bing wasn’t there. So they did a lot of rehearsing and then about ten-thirty, I was going back to my dressing room because he hadn’t arrived, when the big doors opened and up drives Bing. He stops and says, ‘You know, I don’t think I’m gonna make it today.’ I guess he’d been out on the town, but he was absolutely charming and you couldn’t be mad. I said, ‘You’re a very bad boy.’ But that was the only time. He was wonderful. He didn’t get mad, didn’t argue, wasn’t temperamental. He was just nonchalant about everything.” ⁴⁵

Well, almost everything. Carlisle noticed that he was self-conscious about his weight and height; he wore his watch on his inside wrist because, he told her, it made his hands seem less pudgy. And he wore lifts. He once told the diminutive Alan Ladd, who followed him at Paramount Pictures, how pleased he was that Ladd was shorter than he was. Bing maintained that he was five nine, but an office secretary, Nancy Briggs, recalled a visit to his home when he wore slippers and she realized he was just about her height — five seven. ⁴⁶

The shooting of College Humor, in the spring of 1933, coincided with a siege of paranoia on the Paramount lot. Dwarfish Emanuel Cohen was appointed chief of production that year, and no one knew from one day to the next whether the studio would survive or for how long. It might have gone under if not for Mae West’s two 1933 megahits, I’m No Angel and She Done Him Wrong, which grossed more than $2 million each and earned West a place on the annual Quigley box-office poll, the first Paramount player ever to make the list. The uncertainty encouraged the manipulative Cohen to sign West, Gary Cooper, and Bing to personal contracts, much to the horror of his bosses, the bankers in New York, who controlled Paramount’s purse strings and canned him in retaliation, in 1934. The pervasive fear worked its way through the ranks and, if nothing else, sparked a carefree social whirl.

The center for partying on Paramount’s lot was Gary Cooper’s dressing room, prominently located on the stars’ row of bungalows and adjoining that of Carole Lombard. Bing once remarked that the reason they all gravitated there was that Gary was so well liked and Carole told the raunchiest stories. Coop’s happy hour became a ritual for drinking, singing, and trade talk. Marlene Dietrich liked to stop beside Bing’s dressing room to hear him sing and play records, especially those of Richard Tauber. “The crooner confided to me that Tauber had taught him to breathe properly and how to modulate his phrasing,” she wrote. “This common passion brought us together.” ⁴⁷

Contract players at Paramount were inclined to huddle in defense. Everyone knew the studio was in dire trouble, so its stars were sometimes needled as also-rans. MGM was said to have the glamour queens and Warners the stalwart men. Yet Paramount was beginning to forge a new, postcontinental style with Bing, Coop, Lombard, Fredric March, Cary Grant, Miriam Hopkins, George Raft, Charles Laughton, and Claudette Colbert. West and Dietrich were huge, but the approaching hooves of censorship threatened their commercial value. A symbolic changing of the guard occurred when Josef von Sternberg, Dietrich’s cunning director and a specialist in erotic decadence, walked into the Paramount commissary and found Bing at his table. “The air was electric,” wrote columnist Harrison Carroll in 1934. “Bing looked up and said politely: ‘I came in here and I was hungry, so I just sat down at a table.’… Sternberg turned on his heel and went to another table.” ⁴⁸ Within two years Sternberg was gone from Paramount, and soon after from Hollywood.

Workers before and behind the cameras survived the months of uncertainty by playing as hard as they worked. A secretary remembered, “At five, the cameras stopped and out came the bottles and everyone screwed on the desks.” ⁴⁹ Her image conveys the whistling in-the-dark gaiety of a studio that produced hit after hit yet remained on the brink of collapse — a studio that, unlike all the others, had a revolving door where the head of production sat. To make things worse that summer, the technicians went on strike. Bing, who forever maintained his common touch with crews, earned their respect by asking about the dispute in the studio canteen and leaving money with instructions to “keep the boys in beer for the rest of the afternoon.” ⁵⁰

College Humor was rushed into theaters in June, barely a month after principal photography ended. Reviewers were remarkably forbearing. The New York Times considered it “an unsteady entertainment” but detected “heartily amusing patches” and especially liked Bing for his “sense of humor and his subterranean blue notes.” ⁵¹ The Los Angeles Times approved Bing’s “most important role in this peppy film music comedy.” ⁵² Variety reported, “Crosby makes his best showing to date with a chance to handle both light comedy and romance. His pale face make-up is the only flaw so it looks like all he needs is a new paint job and another good role.” ⁵³ The reliably condescending Time, however, thought it a “frantic little absurdity,” fit for “rural cinemaddicts whose tastes in diversion have been shaped by wireless” and observed of Bing his “inappropriate calm which is his chief distinction.” ⁵⁴

The critics were kinder than the censors. James Wingate of the Hays Office warned against the use of hell, pansies, and -punk, and anything that could be construed as satirizing college life: “In this connection,” he wrote a Paramount executive, “[we] suggest that the college president be played straight and not as a heavy paunchy man, or in any other derogatory manner. Also, we would recommend that you do whatever you can to minimize the bitterness of the theme of the picture, which is that a college education does not necessarily spell success in later life.” ⁵⁵ Bing and other cast members promoted the film onstage and on the air, and the public — not just Time’s rubes — lined up for tickets, filling the studio’s coffers at theaters around the country.

* * *

Two long-term intimates joined the Crosby circle during the making of College Humor. Paramount’s publicity campaign included a beauty competition to crown Miss College Humor. The winner was an exquisite young woman from Tucumcari, New Mexico, with golden hair and porcelain skin, named Bessie Patterson. Her prize was a bit part in a Crosby film, but because she was underage, she did not collect for a few years. When the time came, Bing introduced her to Johnny Burke, who became his most accomplished lyricist and Bessie’s husband. The often tumultuous marriage of the Burkes would parallel that of Bing and Dixie.

Leo Lynn reentered Bing’s life while Bing was driving down Sunset Boulevard and noticed his Gonzaga classmate crossing the road. Leo was a few years older than Bing, but they had appeared together in school concerts and plays. Bing pulled over and asked what he was doing in Hollywood. Leo explained that he was working as driver and assistant to English actor Clive Brook. Bing said he needed someone, too. Leo gave Brook his notice that afternoon. He remained Bing’s aide-de-camp until Bing’s death, a quiet, omnipresent, loyal keeper of the keys for forty-four years.

“Leo was almost the shape of Mr. Crosby,” said Alan Fisher, the Crosby butler in the 1960s and 1970s. “A peculiar-looking guy. Leo’s eyes were slightly odd, but they were blue and he was stocky, as Mr. Crosby was in those days before he became thinner. So Leo became his stand-in and driver and would do anything personal for Mr. Crosby.” ⁵⁶ Leo was always around, a shadow, easy to be with, diffident but friendly. “Bing never had an entourage, never,” Rosemary Clooney said. “The entourage was Leo. That was it.” Bing was comfortable with Leo. They had no need to keep up a conversation, and Leo could read his mind when he got in a mood, like the time in the 1950s when he recorded with Clooney and the producer’s friends packed the control room. “Bing would do things I could never figure out,” Clooney recalled. “He sat in a chair facing the wall and I said, ‘You want to go through with this?’ and he said, I’ll be with you in a moment.’ He wanted the people out of the control room, but he didn’t say it. You were supposed to divine these things sometimes with him. But Leo came back with his sandwich and saw right away what was going on.” ⁵⁷

Still, despite the Gonzaga connection, Leo was an employee before he became a friend, a fact that helped define his role as Bing’s right-hand man, a member of the inner circle who knew his place, a place somewhat belied by his working-class manner and reserve. Phil Harris turned the spotlight on Leo whenever he came to see his Las Vegas nightclub act: “There’s a friend of mine in the audience I want you to meet. His name is Leo Lynn. You can’t get through to see Bing Crosby without going through him.” ⁵⁸ After Eddie Lang’s death, Bing unburdened himself to no one. Leo, who played life as close to the vest as Bing, mirrored the change in him. He was a different kind of confidant — one who didn’t unload his confidences or expect others to unload theirs.