21

PUBLIC RELATIONS

Where most of the Hollywood stars look upon personal publicity as the lifeblood of their business, stooping to inane invention and trickery to get it, Bing thumbs his nose at it…. [He] is unco-operative because he just doesn’t give a damn.

—H. Allen Smith, Life in a Putty Knife Factory (1943) ¹

Bing’s role as the Technological Man reflected his introduction to the world of music and entertainment; much as Louis Armstrong’s career reflected his reverse initiation in New Orleans’s honky-tonks. For Bing, the passkey had been the Edison gramophone his father brought home when he was three. It introduced him to a procession of performers — concurrently and without prejudice — that included Irish tenors, Jewish vaudevillians, Sousa marching bands, barbershop quartets, jazz bands, and dance bands. Canned music was unknown to the young Louis, who encountered no less varied a musical banquet— from blues, rags, and minstrelsy to opera, quadrilles, and marches — in the flesh, at picnics and funerals and on the street. When Louis was able to purchase his first wind-up phonograph, as a teenager, his favorites included Caruso and John McCormack, whom he valued for his “beautiful phrasing.” ²

As Bing’s interest in music matured, he continued to find inspiration in the recordings he and Al Rinker memorized and copied. The Musicaladers were, in effect, a garage band — school kids emulating the popular music of the day. But Louis served a true apprenticeship with the very giants he venerated, learning their music and customs firsthand, working alongside experienced men who encouraged his every step. Louis established records as the definitive texts for a new art (his glorious bands, the Hot Five and Hot Seven, existed only to record), yet music remained for him a social experience that required an audience to complete the circle. Bing established all-time statistics with his extended stay at the Paramount Theater, yet music remained for him a skill best realized through mechanical reproduction. After the war, when he made several appearances on Bing’s radio show, Louis played to the audience while Bing played to Louis.

Cocooning himself in technology at the same time he gamboled at sporting events and other public occasions, Bing was magically everywhere and nowhere, a perfect candidate for the ministrations of publicists charged with the assignment of riffing at length on what everybody already knew. The Bing that Paramount’s publicity office spoon-fed the media was, overall, close enough to the truth to give all involved a clean conscience. The releases were written in a simple, mirthful, self-satisfied style that reinvented this most willfully independent of men as a blend of Tom Sawyer, Ragged Dick, Abe Lincoln, and Will Rogers — untouchably appealing, not unlike the folkloric hero of Roaring Lion’s calypso. ³

It has been written that the old studio demagogues spied on their screenwriters, listening for the sound of typing to make certain no one was dawdling. If they didn’t bother checking the cubicles where their public-relations men worked, it was because a cluster of busier writers never lived. Day after day, studio publicists hammered out reams of copy about the company’s principal assets, its stars, much of it laughably untrue. Who had time to check facts? And what star wanted to be pestered by facts? Actors with made-up names and made-up biographies were content to let the studio’s press office reinvent them as it pleased.

The fictionalizing was often essential. The faintest whiff of moral turpitude could be ruinous, grounds to break a contract, although exceptions were made for stars who shone brightly at the box office. In the event of a problem too big for the publicists to hide, a patsy might have to take a fall. Hirelings could always be found to accept the blame for reckless accidents or acquiesce to sham marriages. Most stars, however, required no cover beyond the blizzard of press releases that found their way, virtually unchanged, into newspapers and magazines.

The power and arrogance of publicists was no secret. Hollywood lampooned them mercilessly, invariably portraying them as unscrupulous, ruthless, alcoholic, and utterly indifferent to the desires of the lost souls consigned to their unctuous hands. Onscreen, Lee Tracy (once cited by Bing as a favorite film actor) incarnated the role in Bombshell; Lionel Stander made it nastier in A Star Is Born. In Bing’s She Loves Me Not the press flack is sleazier than the murderers. But the contempt of their associates by no means diminished the press agents’ hold on the public’s credulity. They were abetted by entertainment editors who cheerfully accommodated them, sometimes appending a reporter’s byline to a standard press release. Since Bing’s providential life made for a most seductive serial, Paramount flacks were obliged constantly to rehash it — spinning their own variations. Bing was of little help to them. He shunned invasions of his personal life.

He faced a Jesuitical conundrum: how to remain one of the sheep when everyone persists in treating you like the shepherd; how to keep that unruly mistress fame in her place. Success was a beautiful stranger who compromises a perfect evening by demanding unqualified love. Bing recognized that fans who loved him and expected the same in return were best handled from a distance. Yet even as he resisted public appearances, he assiduously responded to admirers, one at a time. As early as Cremo he made a point of answering his mail, dictating brief and businesslike responses. Several of his fan correspondences went on for years, leading to encounters and friendships. He was godfather to the child of at least one longtime letter writer. ⁴

He blew hot and cold in the same way with colleagues. “Out here, all people want to do is to party and socialize,” he told Cork O’Keefe in the late 1930s. “It got so I’d meet someone on the set for the first time, and next thing they’d be standing on my doorstep with a bunch of friends, expecting to be invited in and entertained. So my home’s off-limits to everyone.” ⁵ Yet his loyalties were absolute. “If you were his friend, he was a friend till the end,” insisted Gary Stevens. “Look at all the song publishers he practically supported, like Rocco Vocco.” ⁶ Vocco had befriended Bing in the Whiteman era, on occasion putting him to bed after a night’s carousing; he could always call on Bing and ask him to debut a song on KMH. Bing was accessible; he answered his own phone. What he did not do very often was entertain guests — especially after 1939.

It was different in the mid-thirties, when Dixie occasionally instigated parties, though she, too, had second thoughts. After the night Joe Venuti came to dinner, she encouraged Bing to entertain his more colorful friends away from home. She had just purchased dining-room chairs with wood-framed wicker backs. Several drinks into the evening, Joe bet Bing he could butt his head through the wicker. Bing anted up, double or nothing, until Joe destroyed every chair, convulsing Bing and enraging Dixie, who banished them to the veranda till morning.

A more serious reason for keeping the world at bay was the fear of kidnappers, magnified by the police, who first warned the Crosbys of a plot before Gary was a year old. Three days after he had been cautioned, Bing obtained a permit to carry a gun, as did Ev; they were sworn in as deputy sheriffs. The publicity turned sour two years later when Bing was stopped for speeding, and the traffic cop noticed his revolver. Bing had forgotten the permit and had to explain himself at the Hollywood police station before he was allowed to continue on to Paramount. He began to realize that some threats were nothing more than unfounded rumors generated by publicity-seekers among the police or at the FBI. Yet if his sons were never endangered, they were nonetheless victimized. Obsessed with their safety, Bing hired bodyguards and imposed strict curfews. His attempt to raise them as regular kids was undermined by his constraining protectiveness.

Every few months, before a new Crosby film premiered, the newspapers and fan magazines published interviews, stories, even articles by Bing himself. Almost all were drawn from publicity releases. The result was fairly astonishing: the illusion that Bing was ubiquitous and approachable, when in fact he was harder to pin down for an interview than perhaps any other star of his stature. He was so pervasive on records and radio that his fans seemed not to notice his long absence from the stage. Bing liked to explain his aversion to live performance by insisting he was not a great entertainer, like Jolson or Fields. All his life, no matter how high his star rose, a part of him remained a fan with his nose pressed against the glass of the very business he ruled. The surest way to get his cold shoulder was to approach him with starry eyes.

The publicity assault had begun early. College Humor had just opened and Too Much Harmony was before the cameras when the studio issued its five-page opus, “The Life Story of Bing Crosby Written by Himself.” ⁷ The best that can be said of the effort is that it reverses the venerable literary tradition in which fictional characters — from Robinson Crusoe to Huckleberry Finn — are made to seem real; here, without any morsal of literary distinction, a real person is made to seem fictional. “I love to sing,” it commences, “and I can thank my lucky stars that other people like to hear me!” It gets worse, hitting notes that resonated for many years: “I’m one of those old-time bathroom baritones (since dignified by the title ‘Crooner’) and, in or out of the bathtub, Brother, I sing!”

Bing’s days as a scalawag were recent enough to require acknowledgment: “I don’t think a crazier guy ever lived than the Bing Crosby who sang at the Cocoanut Grove. Irresponsible? Say, I was so busy having a good time that I didn’t know what responsibility was.” Nor could the growth on his vocal cords be ignored, although he claims not to understand (“Honestly!”) the “husky quaver” it yields. He calls Russ Columbo “a grand entertainer” and says they used to imitate each other (that one must have nettled Bing when he read it). In the “gay dog” days, he says, he broke contracts “without realizing what I was doing and without meaning to harm anyone intentionally.” ⁸ Excerpted or whole, this stuff was widely published.

The mock Bing concedes he can’t tell some things, so he asks Dixie Lee — “the wife, who has been putting up with me for a long time” — to continue. She also sighs a few enduring ditties, adding to a portrait of likable incorrigibility. His clothes: he “always looks as though he’s been pulled out of the scrap bag.” His innocence: “Bing is the most naive person in the world except Dick Arlen.” His shyness: “When he was courting me, he was tongue-tied most of the time — like an awestruck little boy.” His modesty: “He claims to be the laziest man in the world — and yet he works his head off.” His willfulness: “We were having a party one night. At ten, Bing got up from his chair, said, ‘Good night, have a good time.’ With an admonition to me to carry on, he went to bed.” His genuineness: “Today he’s quite the same sort of person that he appears in the films — perhaps that’s why he’s so popular!” ⁹

Rarely did Bing take the trouble to correct errors Paramount promulgated, as he did with the 1934 press release that insisted his son was “not named after Gary Cooper. Bing and Dixie just liked the name” or the canard that found him “shouting ‘bing’ louder than any kid in the neighborhood while playing cowboy in Washington.” ¹⁰ It was usually too late. If one cycle of newspapers circulated a tale, the next repeated it. NBC distributed a biographical three-pager in the summer of 1939, in which nearly every line conveys misinformation. ¹¹ Paramount releases made the malarkey more credible with touches of veracity — the weird clothing, whistling, fishing, self-deprecation, golf, pipe smoking. Some handouts were deemed so effective that the studio recycled them. The one that began “I love to sing” was updated with the title, “Some Sad Words Set to Gay Music,” adding a paragraph about his recent pictures while omitting the passages about Russ Columbo, the husky quaver, and Dixie’s observations. It ends: “I seem to be headed for success and I’m glad that it has come to me at this time, when I am no longer a gay dog, but a business man with a frog in his throat.” ¹²

By 1935 Crosby press releases had grown more subtle, less exclamatory. The gurus most responsible for the fabricated Bing were publicity men Ralph Huston and Dave Keene, who worked under Huston and often adopted Bing’s byline. “Say It with Music: Bing Crosby’s Life Story as Told to Dave Keene” ¹³ was initially written in the third person (“If Bing Crosby hadn’t once tried to earn himself a few dollars by working as a lumberman…”), ¹⁴ then adapted as a memoir (“If I hadn’t once tried to earn a few bucks for myself by being a lumberman…”). In yet another draft Keene took a completely new tack, beginning, “The most important thing in any man’s life is a woman. I’ve been favored above most men….” ¹⁵ It continues with hymns in praise of Bing’s mother, Mildred Bailey, Dixie, and Broadway comedienne Elsie Janis, who, the release claims, was the most important woman in Bing’s life after mother and wife because she prodded him to leave the Rhythm Boys — although “Barris was really the outstanding singer of the bunch. Al and I just made up the harmony.” ¹⁶ (Bing may have known Janis, but he never publicly spoke of her.) ¹⁷ Keene’s chronicle, a dozen pages parsed into five chapters, even revamped Bing’s ancestors, making them Indian fighters as well as sea captains. Bing’s dad was handsomely promoted: “Old Harry had a pickle factory.”

By 1936 most of the elements in the Crosby legend were locked into place and references to his life as a gay dog disappeared. It is impossible not to love the character stitched together in Paramount’s press office — generous, naive, humorous, happy, modest, unpretentious, pleasingly eccentric, devoted to family, bemused by good fortune. “Screen success hasn’t altered his care-free good nature, his carelessness, nor his innate laziness,” Ralph Huston enthused. “The only thing Bing resents is invasion of the privacy of his home. In public, he is perfectly willing to be a public figure. At home, like Garbo, he ‘wants to be alone.’” ¹⁸

By 1938 the releases were filled with tales of golf and the track and of his investments. For a few years he took a strong interest in prizefighting, buying the contract of heavyweight Georgie Turner and, more successfully, a half interest in Tacoma’s Freddie Steele, who fought his way to middleweight champion. Turning his attention to another kind of boxer, he paid $1,500 for Gunda of Barmere (Bing renamed her Venus), whose stock inspired him to dabble in a commercial breeding kennel and enter his dogs in shows. His other investments included real estate and oil wells; an all-girl baseball team, the Croonerettes; Canadian gold mines; a majority share of Select Music Publishing Co.; and an actor’s agency with a chancy roster: actresses Mary Carlisle and Genevieve Tobin, soprano Josephine Tuminia, songwriters John Burke and Arthur Johnston, and Dixie. His diverse interests were managed by Bing Crosby, Inc., the “very legal and secure” (as a finicky Paramount flack put it) ¹⁹ family-run business created as an umbrella for his ever growing assets. Bing was president, Everett and Larry chief officers, and old Harry the bookkeeper of record.

Much was made of Bing’s refusal to accept star billing, his insistence on crediting his success to luck and “swell friends” ²⁰ (“as for acting, Bing doesn’t know the meaning of the word”), ²¹ his imperturbable “naturalness and nonchalance.” ²² He was often coupled with Eddie Cantor as one of Hollywood’s proudest fathers. Not all Paramount flacks read each other’s copy, though; as late as 1938 a newcomer wrote, “There’s no romance how he happened to become ‘Bing.’ He just shouted ‘Bing! Bing!’ louder and oftener than the other kids who played cops and robbers.” ²³

One bulletin saluted talented women — namely, Dixie and the wives of Gary Cooper, Bill Boyd, Errol Flynn, among others — who gave up promising careers to marry Hollywood’s leading men and “retire to plain, old fashioned housewifery.” ²⁴ In another Bing was described, incredibly, as a prophet without honor in his own country, because while he “serenely goes his placid way,” few realize he “ranks high among the top 10 stars of Hollywood.” ²⁵ The most preposterous of them, however, cried poverty on behalf of stars who had to survive on strict allowances to protect them from cadgers and unsavory businessmen. It said Bing was obliged — along with Gary Cooper, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, Fred MacMurray, and other magnanimous but impractical souls — to make do with a stipend, in his case administered through his company. “It may sound ridiculous that any person making as high as $5,000 a week actually has only $25 a week for pocket money. But as a matter of fact, some of the stars are allowed even less than that.” ²⁶ Actually, he was earning $10,000 a week, and as we will see, his “stipend” was $3,000.

Not infrequently, Paramount flacks celebrated the hand that fed them, in Bing’s alleged voice: “Next to love, horse racing, golf, fishing, political speeches, and maybe a couple of other things, the greatest form of entertainment in the world is, to my mind, the motion picture” begins one redundant two-pager. ²⁷ His name was regularly appropriated to tell amusing tales about the filming of his most recent pictures. A story put out in advance of The Star Maker was repeated months later in a release for Road to Singapore, with only the title and director altered; anecdotes were unchanged for both films. In a 1939 release Bing claims he will consider himself a success when he achieves “all the things I’ve always wanted to do.” ²⁸ His list begins with his desire to own a yacht (“Who doesn’t, say you!”) and fish for tarpon in Florida, which may have seemed eerily familiar to anyone who recalled the hero of Here Is My Heart.

But then, the idea was to blur the real Bing and the screen Bing. You need a scorecard to distinguish between facts, near facts, and fibs in many of the passages attributed to him, though the ghostwriter’s motives are usually easy to catch. In 1934, for example, the obliging “Bing” writes:

I don’t smoke much, and I prefer a pipe [true]. Not that smoking might injure my voice [no need to rile potential sponsors], but I just don’t care about it [not true]. I never rehearse a song, whether it’s for a radio, picture or record, more than once [partly true; he rehearsed at home], and I always try to learn it by listening to somebody else sing the lyrics [true]. I always wear a hat or cap while broadcasting [true], for no reason except that it’s comfortable [not true]. I’m not superstitious about anything [apparently true; religion, obviously, does not count]. I don’t bother with a diet of any kind, except when the doctor orders me to [not true]. ²⁹

And so on. A couple of months after that release, Bing signed an article about himself called “Me!” for Picture-Play, which published a specimen of his handwriting to prove his authorship. ³⁰ Included with the usual attributes that show him to be quite human (goes to bed early, even at his own parties; is stubborn and unable to forget slights; can be thoughtless in putting golf ahead of everything else; credits his success to mother’s prayers and blind luck) is the claim that he quit the Cocoanut Grove because management refused to give him his own orchestra! As to the diets he never bothered with: “I am forever bordering on the abyss of obesity. I have attempted many diets to overcome this dangerous inclination, but nothing helps.” ³¹ He playfully takes issue with statements in a previous article by Dixie that was likely written by the same employee who wrote “Me!”

Still, in the realm of public relations, the Paramount pros might have learned a few things from Larry Crosby, who handled that mission for Bing Crosby, Inc. Basil Grillo, who straightened out Bing’s business affairs after the war, once remarked of Larry that his job “consisted mostly of trying to keep Bing’s name out of the paper. I say that facetiously, because with anybody in the public eye, from time to time somebody’ll take a crack at him.” ³² Larry did his share of spin doctoring. For example, there was the night of November 28, 1936, when Bing and his racing friend Lin Howard visited the College Inn in San Diego, after a day spent hunting quail. In the small hours Bing got into a fracas with a group of sailors. The big question: were Bing and the mariners allies or antagonists? Initially, Bing explained that a civilian insulted him and he invited him to step outside, where a fight took place involving sailors who “were on our side.” ³³ Larry was called in after a witness described the incident less patriotically: the sailors recognized Bing as he left the bar and heckled him until he offered to take them on one at a time, but police intervened after a couple of blows. “There wasn’t much to it,” Larry said, “a poke or two — but it was all settled to everybody’s satisfaction. Let’s forget it.” ³⁴ It was forgotten.

A few days later, in December, Bing instigated a suit that would not be forgotten for some time. He took action against Ben McGlashan, the owner and operator of station KOPJ in Los Angeles, for having played his records on two daily programs over the past ten months, presenting them in such a way as to suggest that Bing was in the studio. As filed by his attorney, John O’Melveny, Bing argued that he was known for “personal, original, and individual interpretations” ³⁵ distinct from those of other performers; that the records were clearly labeled “Not Licensed for Radio Broadcast”; ³⁶ and that the defendant unfairly competed with his ability to earn royalties — estimated at two and a half to four and a half cents per record — and advertising revenue.

Ruling in Bing’s favor, Judge Ruben S. Schmidt enjoined McGlashan from broadcasting the Crosby voice or otherwise profiting from it without written permission from Crosby. ³⁷ He was probably irked by McGlashan’s arrogant defense, which denied Bing’s distinctiveness (then why play his records?), claimed every show ended with the announcement that the audience had been listening to phonograph records, and avowed that not-licensed stickers were without meaning — that once consumers bought a record, they could do with it as they pleased. ³⁸ The judge’s decision was no surprise. Fred Waring had won a parallel judgment a year before in Philadelphia. In 1939 both decisions were affirmed in federal court by Judge Vincent L. Leibell, in the case of Paul Whiteman v. WNEW.

A bargain would have to be struck, allowing radio access to records, and artists access to the profits. Beyond the lawsuits, the issue was forced by a congenial spieler named Martin Block, whose Make-Believe Ballroom in New York broadcast records he bought at the nearby Liberty Music Shop. In his chronicle of the music industry, David Sanjek writes that Block “made the profession of disc jockey a respectable one.” ³⁹ One of his early beneficiaries was Decca Records, which earned attention from Block at a time when merchants were intimidated by the established labels out to torpedo Jack Kapp. A few weeks before Judge Leibell’s foregone ruling, Victor, Decca, and Columbia began offering broadcasters records for monthly licensing fees. Radio stations howled, to little avail. At long last the recording industry had its pound of flesh from the medium that a decade earlier almost destroyed it. Many stations continued to resist the record labels by signing contracts with transcription services, which produced discs by major performers exclusively for broadcast. But they soon capitulated. Bing’s role in the battle prefigured his momentous struggle in 1946, when he took a different stand and single-handedly toppled network radio’s policy of live entertainment in favor of prerecorded programs.

In terms of publicity, this was a neutral issue, as were most of the controversies surrounding Bing. ⁴⁰ The press generally gave him a free ride for twenty years. The Treasury did not. Bing was assessed $128,524 in back taxes from 1933 and 1934. No sooner did he request that the Board of Tax Appeals redetermine the debt than the Treasury launched a publicity campaign of its own, pursuing such Hollywood notables as Chaplin, De Mille, Laughton, Dietrich, and the Will Rogers estate. Bing was charged with nonpayment of $159,810. Two years later he was dunned for another $178,000 for the same years. Most of his fans could not have cared less about governmental claims of overdue taxes, but many were dismayed when Bing and other players crossed a picket line in the studio strike of 1937, fueling later rumors of his rank-and-file conservatism. He had much to conserve. His 1936 income was gauged at $508,000: $375,000 for three pictures, $108,000 for thirty-nine KMH shows, $30,000 for a dozen recording sessions plus royalties. ⁴¹

Yet that year and for several to come, Bing faced genuine financial jeopardy, a fact known only to his accountant, Todd W. Johnson; his attorney, John O’Melveny; and himself. Johnson attempted to explain the situation to Bing in a four-page letter in March 1937. ⁴² Working with the figure of $500,000 as Bing’s probable 1937 income, he began by subtracting $100,000 for business expenses, including Everett’s 10 percent. Bing and Dixie’s federal and state tax bills, on the remaining $400,000, would come to $236,900. Their taxes would be larger than in preceding years, he explained, because Bing’s past salaries, excepting $3,000 a week, had been paid to Bing Crosby, Inc., not to Bing as an individual, which was now the case. The tax bite left Bing with $163,100.

After subtracting $13,100 for disallowed expenses, Johnson told Bing he would have $150,000, or $12,500 per month, for “personal use or investment.” Yet in the preceding two months, Bing and Dixie had spent that much ($25,000) as follows: $9,575.03 to Dixie for household and other uses, $13,431.95 lost by Bing at the racetrack, and $1,868.98 for Bing’s miscellaneous personal expenses. In addition, “large sums were spent for care of racehorses, wardrobe, entertainment, etc.,” which the government would not allow. Even if Bing spent only his expected income, the accountant warned, he would be unable to repay an $85,000 bank note he had taken for investments, a racehorse, and other “capital expenditures.” The bottom line, he emphasized, was that for every dollar Bing earned, only thirty cents was available for his discretionary use.

Johnson worried that he might be “taking a chance of incurring [Bing’s] ill-will” in commenting on his “personal expenditures” but maintained that as his friend, he wanted to make sure “that your untiring efforts and long days and hours of work will result in your accumulating a considerable fortune, instead of having nothing left when your career is ended.” Then he gave up the niceties and typed in panicky capital letters:

ALL OF YOUR PERSONAL EXPENDITURES COME OUT OF YOUR PART OF YOUR EARNINGS AND DO NOT COME OUT OF THE GOVERNMENT’S PART.

Such storm warnings would have seemed simply unbelievable to the public. Bing’s fortune was part of his élan. In the mid-1940s, when his income from records was higher than that from films, his income as an entertainer would approach and finally settle in the area of seven figures — figures that did not take into account his diverse business interests. But even then the combination of confiscatory taxes and large expenditures gave his accountant palpitations.

Given those amounts and the frequent stories in which Bing was listed among the ten highest paid Americans (he was ranked eighth in 1936, in a list topped by William Randolph Hearst and including only two other entertainers, Mae West and Marlene Dietrich), ⁴³ Larry’s task was not merely to keep his name out of the papers but to underscore his most attractive qualities, not least his indifference to protocol. The public was so enamored of Bing’s eccentricities that what might have been bad publicity for others redounded in his favor, as in 1937, when he attended the British film colony’s Armistice Day celebration in an ordinary suit while the other men wore white tie and tails. When a few months later, in February 1938, he barred photographers from KMH broadcasts because they broke his concentration, the “bulb pressers,” as he called them, knew they were licked and relented.

He even benefited from one of the era’s strangest scandals. Four years earlier, in 1933, John Montague had arrived in Hollywood and quickly earned a reputation as an exceptional but mysterious golfer. With his 220-pound impeccably attired frame and a fedora or cap shading his ingratiating smile, he evidently charmed all he met and became the valued crony of several Hollywood notables, most prominently Bing. Actors appreciated his demand for privacy and his secrecy regarding the source of his wealth (his long disappearances into the desert led some to speculate gold mines). Mysterious Montague, as the press called him, refused to play in tournaments and shunned photographers; he broke the cameras of several who attempted to take his picture. His abilities were hyperbolized after he challenged Bing to a match using only a rake, shovel, and baseball bat, and won. Westbrook Pegler called him a modern Paul Bunyan, and Grantland Rice reported the rumor that he whacked a bird off a telegraph wire with a 170-yard drive. Former U.S. Amateur champion George Von Elm called him “the greatest golfer in the world.” ⁴⁴ Time glowingly profiled him twice, attesting to his sheer brawn with tales of his lifting Oliver Hardy, briefly Montague’s roommate, with one hand, and ending an altercation at the Lakeside Club by “standing husky Cinemactor George Bancroft on his head in his locker and closing the door.” ⁴⁵

The novelty match with Bing was his undoing. The publicity could not be contained. A photographer stalked them on the links and shot Montague with a telephoto lens, selling the pictures to newspapers and Life. An ex-con in upstate New York saw them and notified the police, who for seven years had been searching for the con’s former partner. Montague was arrested in Beverly Hills in July and gave Bing as his reference. After fighting extradition for a month, he was returned to the Adirondacks, jailed for two days without bail, and denounced by the Essex County district attorney as a “vicious criminal.” ⁴⁶ His story, as it unraveled that summer, was too far-fetched for a movie.

In 1930 a man named La Verne Moore — known in his hometown of Syracuse as a prodigious athlete, pool-hall hustler, ladies’man, and well-mannered thug — and three others broke into a roadhouse, beat the owner’s elderly father-in-law senseless, stole $750, and drove off in two cars, one of which overturned, killing the driver. Two of the thieves were arrested and served two years in jail, leaving the fourth, who vanished until he turned up in movieland, celebrated for his “phenomenal drives and deadly chip shots.” ⁴⁷ Montague denied the accusation, but Mr. and Mrs. Moore — and his fingerprints — confirmed that he was their son, La Verne. The witness against him was the putative accomplice who saw his picture in the papers. Testifying to his character were affidavits from Bing, Oliver Hardy, Guy Kibbee, Otto Kruger, and George Von Elm, among others. The only witness called to testify on his behalf in court was Montague’s ailing mother, who insisted her boy was home in bed the night of the robbery. Immediately after his acquittal, Montague and the prosecutor who had called him a “vicious criminal” made a date to play golf. The press was amused.

When it was over, the only person to get a lift out of the episode was Bing. Cal Tinney of the New York Post declared him Man of the Week, because, as the headline read, he WENT TO BAT FOR GOLFER MONTAGUE AND SAVED HIM FROM JAIL.. ⁴⁸ The jury was probably more persuaded by the uncanny memory of Montague’s mother, but Bing’s affidavit received more attention. In the five years they had been friends, he wrote, he had “never known him to behave other than as a gentleman…. The circle that he moved in accepted him as an upright man.” ⁴⁹ Bing’s loyalty was greatly admired: he offered, in vain, any amount of bond to get him out of jail in Los Angeles and posted $25,000 to free him from jail in Essex County while he awaited trial. Everett signed him to a contract with Bing Crosby, Inc., which Montague boasted would earn him a million bucks.

That was too much for Larry. “Million dollars!” he yelped. “He’s going to make a couple of shorts showing how he plays golf, but they won’t bring in more than twenty thousand.” Some magazine pieces were in the works, Larry said, and maybe a guest spot on KMH — “he’ll probably get a thousand or so for that.” ⁵⁰ Now Kraft-Phenix was riled and declared flatly that he would never appear. Bing was, as usual, blithe if mischievous: “I don’t know what Monty’s plans are, but he ought to make a lot of money. I suppose he’ll go into pictures…. I imagine he’ll play roles such as George Bancroft plays.” ⁵¹ At which point the story came to a full stop. Montague never worked in films, never capitalized on his immense fame in golf, never made any kind of news at all. Absent from the extended golfing section in Call Me Lucky, he had by the time of its publication seemingly vanished from the earth and all its memories. ⁵²

During the very months Montague was the tabloids’ darling, Larry had his hands full with two remarkable publicity ventures. The second of them, a homecoming event, was a flawless coup that secured forever Bing’s standing as Spokane’s hometown boy. The first, however, was a fiasco. At the heart of the matter was the longest press release ever written about a film star: a 207-page biography, Bing, published in the spring of 1937, written by Ted and Larry Crosby, with an unattributed assist from Bing.

Poor Ted: life had not emulated the moral logic of his undergraduate stories. He married Hazel Nieman at twenty-four, and they had three daughters, including twins; it may or may not speak to the piety of his home that one of the latter entered the Holy Names order at eighteen, as Sister M. Catherine Joan. ⁵³ Ted was a likable, hardworking family man, the only sibling to remain in Spokane, where he continued to harbor his long-standing ambition to write. He put his abilities to use as publicist for Washington Water Power but longed for a place in show business; to that end, he wrote songs and stories and kept on the lookout for talent he could promote. All his efforts in those areas came to nothing, while his brother seemed to fall upward from peak to peak, a charmed soul, living the life Ted had fantasized about in his college tales.

The book project began surprisingly early, in Bing’s career, in late 1934 or early 1935. For Ted it held the promise of additional income and the chance to publish — to mine the one commercial subject available to him. For a while he worked on the book alone, without input from Bing’s office, though he kept Larry and Bing informed of his progress. At the same time, he was trying to interest Bing in various business ventures, soliciting him for seed money. Bing demurred, on one occasion telling him he could not afford the risk, as he was between contracts and had no guarantee of his standing in the coming year. Then a proposal fell into Bing’s lap that he extended to Ted. Collier’s had approached Grover Jones, a contributor to the magazine and one of the most resourceful of Paramount’s screenwriters (The Virginian, Trouble in Paradise, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Milky Way), about writing a three-part life of Bing. ⁵⁴ Paramount, perhaps influenced by the labors of its publicity staff, was thinking along similar lines. In a letter that speaks to Hollywood’s — and his — cavalier approach to biographical accuracy, Bing wrote Ted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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