6
No doubt the appeal of minstrelsy came from these draughts upon a common reminiscence, stirring some essential wish or remembrance.
— Constance Rourke, American Humor (1931) 1
Although Bing quickly decided against becoming a priest, he did reach a compromise that appeased Kate. Lawyering was reasonably honorable and solid and would make use of his gifts for elocution and debate. Kate could also console herself with the fact that law school would keep him at home for another couple of years. Frank Corkery, who served mass with Bing, did not think that his friend gave much thought to the priesthood — not this independent young man who dreamed of sultanic riches while nosing around in skid-row muck, who had lately managed to turn what promised to be a brief stint on a nearby farm into a flight to the coast, an aborted trip south, and a narrow escape from what he liked to quaintly refer to as durance vile.
Gonzaga University was not, however, a mere continuance of high school. Though the student body numbered no more than 300, many of them neighborhood boys, the university harbored its own prejudices, directed against day students like Bing, who were not permitted to partake of dormitory activities. Bing and the other townies were required to leave campus by half past four, except for the one evening per week when the debating society met. The “boarders,” students from outside Spokane, considered Bing’s crowd mere provincials and demanded they prove themselves. But Bing never had any trouble making friends. He was “a cheerful and appealing guy,” in Ray Flaherty’s recollection, “a knowledgeable, very entertaining person to be around.” 2 Still, the boarders did not make it easy for him. Though he ultimately disarmed them with his voice, at first he was reluctant to sing formally and switched his musical inclinations to the drums. “I didn’t have to learn a feeling for music and for rhythm,” Bing observed. “I was born with that.”
Had the Crosbys not lived in the vicinity, they could not have afforded Bing’s schooling. Boarders paid $265.50 a semester. Day students paid only $80.50 (thirty dollars more than high school), payable on registration day. 3 When he took up drums in the spring of his freshman year, Bing was obliged to pay an additional $7.50 for use of the instrument. When in his junior year he enrolled in the combined college and law course, which conferred bachelor’s and law degrees in six years, his tuition per semester increased another seventy-five dollars. Sensitive to his parents’ investment in his education, Bing applied himself for the first two years, fulfilling requirements in English, Latin, modern languages (Spanish and French), public speaking, mathematics, and religion. “A man of fair capacity who has conscientiously followed this curriculum,” pledged the Gonzaga Register of 1920, “will thus be in touch and sympathy with progress in every field of intellectual activity.” 4
Bing was as diligent as one could be about wearing the green beanie required of freshmen. “There is one thing that beats snipe shootin’ and that is hunting Freshmen without green caps,” the Register contended. 5 He matriculated as a member of the largest freshman class so far, at an exciting time in the school’s history. That year Gonzaga hired the nationally known coach and former Notre Dame quarterback Gus Dorais. 6 Thanks to Dorais, whose tenure exactly paralleled Bing’s (Dorais was long regarded as second only to Bing in bringing recognition to the school), the next four years proved to be the university’s golden age of football. Bing was too small to play on the invincible football and basketball teams, but he made his enthusiasm known and was elected to the new advisory board on athletics as one of two assistant yell leaders. In his sophomore year he and thirty-four other students tried out for two baseball teams. Bing made the cut, and Dorais assigned him third base. 7
All school sports were supervised by the advisory board, controlled by its moderator, Curtis J. Sharp, S.J., a robust personality and erstwhile amateur boxer who had recently arrived at Gonzaga from Anaconda, Montana. He was to Bing an exemplary figure, combining harsh discipline with amiable generosity. Armed with a leather strap that he applied to the backsides of younger students and the hands of older ones, Sharp nonetheless inspired a fervent devotion, perhaps too much so. As a parent, Bing would obtain “a big leather belt — similar to the one I’d backed up to at Gonzaga in the hand of Father Sharp.” 8 Bing acquired more than a trust in corporal punishment from Sharp. He admired his poise, his man’s-man rectitude, and regular-Joe disposition. Bing often told how in 1937, when he brought his radio show to Gonzaga for a homecoming game and received an honorary degree, he slipped into the locker room to swig the remainder of a pint. In burst Father Sharp. Bing stashed the bottle — “an instinctive return to the habits of my student years.” 9 As they small-talked their way out the door, Sharp suddenly stepped back to where Bing had been sitting and retrieved the hidden flask. He emptied it with a gulp and observed, “It wouldn’t be right to let a soldier die without a priest.” 10 It was Sharp on whom Bing modeled Father O’Malley in Going My Way.
Two other instructors Bing had reason to recall with more than usual regard were Father Edward Shipsey and James Gilmore. Shipsey, the chairman of the English department, helped train Bing in elocution, teaching him to roll rs, carol vowels, assert consonants, and distinguish the elements, patterns, and meanings of speech. Bing memorized and delivered with gusto recitations by Elijah Kellogg, the nineteenth-century clergyman who wrote “Spartacus to the Gladiators”; Robert W. Service, the popular Canadian poet responsible for “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”; and others. He once said, “If I am not a singer, I am a phraser. Diseur is the word. I owe it all to elocution.” The enunciation tricks learned from Father Shipsey became habit and mask, a front underscored by his affection for ten-dollar words, faux-British circumlocutions, and spiel worthy of riverboat gamblers. Bing’s diction would define his radio persona, frequently bordering on intentional self-parody.
James Gilmore, a young, well-liked chemistry instructor who led field trips throughout Spokane and sang a good bass harmony, was obsessed with inventing a tonic to grow hair. He recruited Bing as a guinea pig, an indication that the diseur’s thinning hair was noticeable even in his teens. While his friends were sheared at the on-campus Blue & White Shop (“Tonsorial Art by Tonsorial Artists”), Bing endured private sessions with Mr. Gilmore, who — though unable to save his leery volunteer from a life sentence of “scalp doilies” — eventually brought to market a product called Gilmore Hair-More. 11 Bing grew to care less. Alone among the Hollywood stars of his era and stature, he never concealed his reliance on or distaste for toupees. Unlike John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart, who never appeared without them, Bing wore his only for professional purposes, when he could not get by with a hat. Errol Flynn was so amused by Bing’s willingness to attend sporting events, restaurants, and parties without a rug that he once walked over to his table and planted a (photographed) kiss on top of Bing’s bare head. Film work was another story. When submitted a script, Bing counted the outdoor scenes where a hat could square the issue, and sometimes demanded more. Writers accommodated him; wardrobe provided every kind of hat, cap, and turban imaginable.
Bing maintained a B average in his freshman year, excelling in English. But playacting and music were becoming increasingly important to him, and he emerged as a school favorite, rivaling his friend and supreme big man on campus Mike Pecarovich. Mike was the tall, handsome student council president, gifted athlete (a disciple of Dorais, he later coached Gonzaga and Loyola), and leading man in Gonzaga theatricals. He was two years older than Bing, who first supported, then costarred, and finally eclipsed him; Mike could neither sing nor get laughs. Yet most would have bet on Mike to succeed, especially after he appeared in a production of The Bells at Santa Clara University and, according to the Spokane Daily Chronicle, “drew raves from California critics.” 12 If Bing minded in the least playing second fiddle, he must have enjoyed the sublime revenge, a dozen years later, of giving him bit parts in a few pictures. By the 1990s, Gonzaga students could stroll through Pecarovich Field and study at Crosby Library.
A month into his first semester, Bing performed in a musical program at a smoker with the short-lived Republican Quartette, including his accomplice from the Boone Avenue gang Ralph Foley. Despite the cynical election of Warren G. Harding to the presidency that season, the GOP was not yet synonymous with plutocratic conservatism, certainly not in the state of Washington, where Republicanism was associated with statehood, achieved over long-term Democratic opposition.
A musical event of greater import that year was the release of Paul Whiteman’s first record, “Whispering” and “The Japanese Sandman,” which sold 2.5 million copies. Whiteman’s dance music was far more grounded in Viennese salons than in jazz, yet that record captured the attention of an era, with its novel slide-whistle solo (to which no less than King Oliver paid homage in his 1923 “Sobbin’ Blues”) and gentle Dixieland ingredients like muted brasses and lively banjo-driven rhythms. Whiteman would dominate the recording industry for the next decade, until Bing supplanted him. His records, released on an average of one a month, enchanted Bing and countless other would-be musicians around the country.
A few weeks later the Gonzaga Dramatic Club presented the comedy The Dean of Ballarat in St. Aloysius Hall, to benefit the student band. “Each player seemed especially fitted for his part,” the school paper reported, noting that Bing portrayed “a colored aristocrat with the dignity and willingness to receive ‘tips’ so common to that class.” 13 He billed himself as Harry L. Crosby, Jr., A.B. ’24, for the first time, suggesting an attempt to try on his father for size, and at least a subliminal acknowledgment that acting was serious stuff but also an improvident activity belonging to the Happy Harry sphere of life. Shortly before the semester ended, he again appeared in blackface, for Gonzaga University Glee Club’s minstrel show A Study in Tone and Color. Only Bing was featured twice — in a duet with Dirty Sixer Joe Lynch, on “That Shakespearian Rag,” and as soloist on “When the Moon Shines.” He also played one of four end men who “kept the entire audience in a continuous uproar.” 14 Whatever appeal blackface had for the other end men (among them Leo Lynn), for Bing it represented a bond with the mighty Al Jolson, whose talents he broadly emulated. 15
* * *
The importance of minstrelsy in the development of America’s popular arts can hardly be overstated, and Crosby was steeped in it. The genesis of American minstrelsy has been credited to an English music-hall performer, Charles Matthews, who while touring the South in 1822 became intrigued with Negro music and dialect. Blackening his face with burnt cork, he offered himself as an interpreter of “Ethiopian” melodies. Contemporaneously, a group of black performers in New York, frustrated because Negro patrons were not allowed to attend theaters, staged Richard III at the corner of Mercer and Bleecker Streets. They did not get to tour the country. The minstrels did. Negro minstrelsy, as it was called regardless of the performers’ race, was the only acceptable conduit for what was thought of as native Negro artistry. Though antebellum troupes were white, the form developed in a forced racial collaboration, illustrating the axiom that defined — and continues to define — American music as it developed over the next century and a half: African American innovations metamorphose into American popular culture when white performers learn to mimic black ones.
In 1830 a showman named Joel W. Sweeney perfected and popularized the modern banjo, an instrument he had learned to play from slaves on his father’s Virginia plantation; it would become minstrelsy’s dominant instrument. That same year, Thomas “Daddy” Rice happened to see a black Louisville stablehand do a whirling dance while singing about a character named Jim Crow; Rice made off with the step and the song, and embarked on a prominent career. For the sake of authenticity, Rice also blacked his face with cork, a custom that lasted a century — until the introduction of Pan-Cake makeup, which facilitated the tradition just as it was drawing to an end. (Cork was arduous to remove, and the pros soon learned to use soap and cold water only, as warm water or cream pressed it into the pores like gunshot.)
The first successful blackface company, the Virginia Minstrels, debuted in New York in 1843. (One of its four members, Dan Emmett, would later adapt a black melody for his most durable song, “Dixie.”) The next year, 1844, William Henry Lane, a black trick dancer who performed under the name Master Juba, humbled the popular “Ethiopian imitators” in a dancing competition. It did him no good: the blacked-up imitators dominated minstrelsy in the decades before Reconstruction, rallying American songwriting to its first ereative and commercial peak. That summit was symbolized in 1848 by the publication of Stephen Fosters “Oh! Susanna,” described by cultural historian Constance Rourke as “a fiddler’s tune with a Negro beat and a touch of pathos in the melody.” 16
Minstrelsy was a theatrical mode premised upon the conceit that slave life could be illuminated and prettified by a gallery of grotesques. Its performers had to balance parodic intent with sincere imitation. Caricatures became standardized: the shiftless plantation layabout, Jim Crow; the fatuous urban dandy, Zip Coon; the addled pickaninny, Sambo. Yet many minstrels thought of themselves as actors communicating truths about Negro life, as if the stereotypes were roles as valid as Othello and Aida. 17 In time, the caricatures took on lives of their own, removed from the original intent. “The function of this mythology,” Ralph Ellison observed, “was to allow whites a more secure place (if only symbolically) in American society.” 18 But for the last generation of white blackface performers, the Negro-ness was all but forgotten. Bob Hope, who did a blackface act in vaudeville, said of the genre’s passing, “People thought they were making fun of blacks, but it was just a way of playing characters, you know? Minstrel shows were very large. At one theater where I was playing and getting very little money, I got to the theater late and I didn’t have time to put the black on and so I walked out with my regular face. After the show, the theater manager came back and said, ‘Don’t put that stuff on your face, You got a face that saves jokes.’ In those days, you did blackface but you downplayed the minstrel aspect.” 19
In the mid-nineteenth century, as Stephen Foster and other songwriters improved the musical fare, crude dialect songs were replaced by a genteel but equally pernicious type of song, expressing yearnings for the protective hand of dear ol’ massa. After the Civil War the minstrel palette became much broader. “If the Negro was set free,” Constance Rourke realized, “in a fashion his white impersonators were also liberated.” 20 With other minorities streaming into the country, minstrel conventions broadened to include caricaturing Italians, Irish, Jews, Germans, Dutch, Scottish, Indians, Chinese (Asians provided the most durable actors’ mask of all) 21 — any group sufficiently different or mysterious enough to warrant parodic deflation. Even women, long imitated by male actors, were invited to participate, although female impersonators never lost their box-office seduction. “In fantasy, the American types seemed to be joining in a single semblance,” Rourke wrote. “But Negro music and Negro nonsense still prevailed,” 22
At its height, minstrelsy was a stylized, codified, and even ritualized variety show. At center stage was the stout announcer, Mr. Interlocutor, who kibitzed with the end-men comics, Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones. Between them sat the company — as many as seventy men in the larger companies, all corked, bewigged, and attired in loud, mockingly overstated costumes. After an introductory segment of jokes and songs, the olio (variety acts) got under way, presenting dancers, singers, mimics, monologists, sketches, mini-plays, guest performers, and so on. The climax was a walk-around finale, when the entire company let loose on unison banjos or tambourines for a rousing send-off. As an idiom that squelched individuality, minstrelsy inevitably inspired fantasies about disguise. Jolson’s film Mammy concerns a murderer hiding out in a minstrel troupe. (Well, Officer, he had coal black skin, a huge mouth, kinky hair, and white gloves.) In The Jolson Story Al gets his big break by impersonating another performer who can’t go on; no one notices the substitution. In dozens of Hollywood comedies, many starring Bugs Bunny, a faceful of soot triggers a total racial makeover. Before Bing can scrub black paint off his face in Mack Sennett’s Dream House, a black director hires him as a black actor.
Doppelgàngers are at the heart of minstrelsy. Over time, they had a baleful influence: people confused racist stereotypes with real people, and those images remained rife in pop culture — especially Hollywood — well into the 1970s. In the short run, though, minstrelsy was considered a boon to the abolitionist movement. It humanized blacks for many whites who didn’t know any, undermining the assumptions of barbarism by caricaturing them as sentimental, clever, funny, pompous, stupid, and sexual — human. Minstrelsy embodied a subversive idea, that the distinctions between black and white ran no deeper than a layer of greasepaint. Hidden behind an impenetrably inky disguise, performers were permitted a certain liberality from puritanical constraints, underscored by the nattering horse laugh “yuk, yuk, yuk.” After Reconstruction, black troupes were as plentiful as white ones and introduced scores of actors and musicians into show business. They created their own kinds of satire and softened the more abhorrent clichés, greatly influencing succeeding generations of white minstrels. Jolson’s alter ego, Gus, is offensive as caricature but is invariably the smartest and gentlest character in the drama; foolish whites are lost without him. In Bombo Gus shows Columbus the way to the New World and wins a Moorish princess in the bargain.
The minstrel show was the first unifying form of entertainment America ever knew. Like the circus, the coming of a minstrel troupe was an event, but minstrels — undeterred by the seasons — appeared more frequently than the circus. Not unlike radio or TV, minstrelsy spread the same jokes, songs, dance steps, parodies, puns, and novelties all over the country. Its humor proved deathless: Why did the chicken cross the road? Who was that lady I saw you with last night? By the time the form began to morph into burlesque and vaudeville, many individual stars had emerged. To the comically melancholy black entertainer Bert Williams, cork was an indignity he was forced to accept as the cost of integrating the Ziegfeld Follies. White performers could afford to be more sanguine. No one who witnessed the graceful Eddie Leonard gliding across the stage singing “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider” or Eddie Cantor leaping about like a rabbit in a shooting gallery thought of them as impersonators of Negro life. Minstrelsy had become a conduit for the American style. 23 It was buoyant, irreverent, outlandish, and voiced with an oddly alloyed accent that was widely construed as southern.
Bing was enamored of many things southern, personally as well as professionally; he married two southern belles. His longtime buddy Phil Harris used as a theme song “That’s What I Like About the South,” which comically enumerates the specifics. Bing liked the whole effect, the mystique, the humor, the songs, the speech cadences that chimed well with his bottom notes and vocal affectations. As the character Crosby plays in the movie Birth of the Blues tells his disapproving father: “Southern music makes you feel like the circus is coming to town.” He found inspiration in the South, in the first recordings by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the Mound City Blue Blowers, and more profoundly in the triumphant art of transplanted southern blacks, most particularly Louis Armstrong.
To Bing’s generation, southern was a synonym for black: this was blatantly the case in songs by Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer, and others — a euphemistic way of saying that the American style of music sweeping the world was rooted in a slave culture. The very cosmopolitan dancer Florence Mills, whom Duke Ellington eulogized in his stride nocturne “Black Beauty,” made the case succinctly in the title of her 1926 touring show: Dixie to Broadway.
On the occasion of Bing’s fiftieth anniversary in show business, an event extolled with a 1975 television special but not by the recording industry he had helped save from extinction, he led a small jazz ensemble into a studio, at his expense, to record the rarely heard LP A Southern Memoir. But whose memories were they? For the young Crosby, Dixie was a state of mind and his passport was the faded but inveterately popular minstrel show, which helped bolster his determination to venture beyond his immediate domain. However intuitive and urbane Bing’s understanding of jazz, he never lost his adolescent affection for the dese, dose, yowsuh, yuk-yuk relics of southernness ritualized in minstrelsy. His recorded performances are rife with words, airs, and slurred inflections that bespeak the show-business customs of his youth. They were especially apparent when he performed with his favorite southern singers, like Connie Boswell. Their 1940 record “Yes Indeed” begins with repartee:
Bing: Now has you got it, sister Constance? Tell me, has you got it?
Connie: Whoayeah, I got it, brother Bingstance. Now you knows I got it.
Bing: Now has you got that rhythm in you, hmmm?
“Yes Indeed,” characteristically enough, was a gospel-influenced pop tune written by the highly sophisticated, black northern orchestrator Sy Oliver for the white northern bandleader Tommy Dorsey It was no more southern than the dozens, if not hundreds, of southern songs turned out by Tin Pan Alley during Jolson’s glory years. Gerald Marks, the northerner who wrote “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?,” observed, “In those days, New York songwriters wrote about the South because they had a guy who knew how to sing ’em. All those mammies were written by songwriters who never went south of Fourteenth Street. But the minute Jolson got off his knees and left the Wintergarden Theater, the era of southern songs was done for.” 24
The minstrel style was thriving in various offshoots when Bing latched onto the entertainment world. The first broadcast variety show featured Dailey Paskman’s Radio Minstrels, in 1924; radio’s real triumph was certified five years later with the appearance of Amos ‘n’Andy. Bing’s audience would follow him into the modern world of ballad crooning and jazz while sharing his nostalgia for the old style. Bing appeared in blackface or drag (the minstrelsy of gender bending) in several pictures. Even his loquacious banter, including the lightning exchanges of insults perfected with Bob Hope, was rooted in the verbal contest between minstrelsy’s sly end man and the oratorical ringmaster. Bing was equally content to play the lackadaisical Mr. Bones or the inflated Interlocutor.
Gonzaga productions were occasions for fellowship, acceptable impiety, and escape, and Bing often took part. At a second-semester charity bazaar, he and his class erected a tepee and raffled Indian blankets in redface while his mother helped stock and supervise the tearoom. In April, in his own face, Bing and another boy sang solos at the annual Gonzaga Night, held at the Knights of Columbus Hall. Music was provided by the Dizzy Seven, a Gonzaga High School band that had caught Bing’s ear. Having already begun to study drums, he was chosen as one of three drummers (Leo Lynn, his future right-hand man, was another) for the Gonzaga band, playing assemblies and sporting events. Soon he began sitting in with the younger kids who made up the Dizzy Seven, though he did not sing with the group.
The pianist with the Dizzy Seven on Gonzaga Night was a high-school senior, Arthur Dussault, who would develop a long-lived, influential relationship with Bing. Dussault had come to Gonzaga in 1920 from Montana. He was the same age as Bing, and so (not having been enrolled in elementary school prematurely) was one grade behind. Dussault first noticed Bing during a football game between the high-school JYA and an unofficial frosh team, which made a lot of noise about teaching them a thing or two but lost. Writing about the game years later, he recalled that Bing played center with startling toughness, considering his small size, winning respect from the other kids. “He had what it took and could give as well as take.” 25 In many ways they were opposites. Like Frank Corkery, Dussault was bound for the priesthood, ordained in 1935. He was president of his class, a fabled football hero, and an exemplary student. He had little interest in jazz or dance music, preferring to play organ for the student choir and Gonzaga’s orchestra. Bing and Art were never close friends, but their admiration for each other developed in the Dizzy Seven (aka the Juicy Seven) as they lumbered through stock arrangements at school dances. A friend described them as “equals, both strong-willed.” 26 Dussault would serve Gonzaga as athletic director, glee club director, dean of men, public-relations director, and vice president; he was called Mr. Gonzaga. A successor remarked, “He was the most honest man I’ve ever known and an ideal contact for Bing — as was Father Corkery.” 27 One of his duties was to enhance ties with the school’s most celebrated alumnus, and he succeeded to the point of extracting nearly a million dollars. In so doing, he became something of a Crosby family confessor.
Shortly after publication of Barry Ulanov’s 1948 biography The Incredible Crosby, Father Art wrote down his remembrances of the first time Bing made his mark singing at Gonzaga. Ulanov had rendered the incident from Kate’s point of view, which Dussault dismissed as poetic license, for “Mrs. Catherine Crosby (whom I knew well) was never in our chapel.” 28 He remembered the date as December 8, 1922, a holy day of obligation — the Immaculate Conception, a holiday that required Catholic boys to attend mass. For Dussault and about 200 other boarders, that meant the school chapel. Though Bing lived only a block away, he was obliged as a day scholar to attend St. Aloysius.
Art was chosen to ask him to attend the chapel instead, in order to add his voice to a three-part hymn, “Panis Angelicus.” The boys thought Bing’s baritone would blend with the high tenor (a student) and bass (“Hair-More” Gilmore). Art also hoped he would sing with the choir and take the solo at Communion on “Oh Lord, I Am Not Worthy,” a hymn all the boys knew. Bing was reluctant at first, but Art, who was to accompany him on organ, persuaded him: he was going to church anyway, so why not attend a congregation that would consist only of fellow students? Besides, here was a way to please “his many warm friends among the boarders.” Bing agreed to give it a try. “Of course, when he soloed, which was really impressive,” Dussault wrote, “a goodly number of prayer-goers looked around to see who was soloing.”
Bing’s immediate reward was an invitation to breakfast with the boarders, the first of many as he made several subsequent appearances at the chapel on feast days, invariably singing a solo. “Bing sang nice,” Dussault recalled, “but in a different sort of way.” 29 He usually sang the Communion hymn and then joined in with the trio, navigating between tenor and bass with his supple voice. Dussault recalled as particularly beautiful the trio’s harmonizing on “Ave Maris Stella No. 2,” by A. H. Roseweig (from his collection Concentus Sacri). He believed those performances boosted Bing’s confidence.
Bing received another shot of inspiration the summer after his freshman year, when he worked as prop boy at the Auditorium and Jolson made his second visit to Spokane. Bing had been fourteen the first time Jolson passed through; he was eighteen when Sinbad played two nights in town. “[Jolson] was amazing,” Bing said. “He could go way up high and take a soft note, or belt it, and he could go way down. He really had a fabulous set of pipes, this fella.” 30 He spoke of unconsciously imitating Al and of the lessons he learned: “I got an awful lot of mannerisms and I guess you could say idiosyncracies [from Jolson] — singing traits and characteristics and delivery.” 31 Bing marveled at how he seemed to personally reach each member of the audience, a feat for which Bing would be credited as a radio crooner. But the difference between working live and electronically was not lost on him. If Bing was inspired by Jolson, he was also humbled. He nursed the lifelong conviction that he could not really hold a stage, not like Jolie. “I’m not an electrifying performer at all,” he cautioned one admirer. “I just sing a few little songs. But this man could really galvanize an audience into a frenzy. He could really tear them apart.” 32
Yet they had much in common. Jolson, notorious for his braggadocio (he once followed Caruso with his trademark line, ’You ain’t heard nothin’yet!”), had once lacked confidence and found it when an older player advised him to try blackface. It worked: “You looked and felt like a performer,” he said. 33 A conspicuous bravado, albeit greatly toned down, was no less crucial to Bing’s first Hollywood persona, that of the extremely assured if somewhat petulant Romeo who never merely wins a girl but steals her from another. Like Bing, Jolson was of average height, with thinning hair and a weight problem. Al perfected the pseudosouthern slur to the degree that critic John Crosby (no relation to Bing) observed, “He managed to eliminate consonants almost entirely.” 34 The formidable Ethel Waters, who shared Bing’s admiration for Jolson, could not help but parody his inflections: “From the day he first stepped on a stage, Jolie always sang as though he expected the next note to be his last ‘wah wah’ or ‘bebee mine’ or ‘I loav you, honeh, loav, loav you’ or ‘Californyah, heah I come, Golden Gate/” 35 Jolson was a baritone who scaled tenor highs and plumbed bass lows, as Bing would, but reigned during an era when most popular singers — Billy Murray, Nick Lucas, Gene Austin — were tenors, often effeminate or sexually ambiguous. The bond between Jolson and Crosby would be strengthened in the years ahead by songwriters, including James Monaco, Buddy DeSylva, and Irving Berlin, who crafted Jolson’s signature hits and also played prominent roles in Bing’s career. In the end, the tables turned, as Jolson learned from Bing how to handle ballads and exploit recording devices.
Watching Sinbad from the sidelines invigorated Bing, and he participated in several theatrical events his sophomore year. At a vaudeville benefit for Gonzaga High School’s sports program, he took two turns, playing a satirical sketch with a friend, billed as Ray and Bing, and singing comical songs, as Harry Crosby. In a review of It Pays to Advertise, a three-act comedy presented by the Varsity Drama Club, Bing was the only cast member singled out by the student reviewer: “Harry Crosby as the genial press agent ‘Ambrose Peale’ kept the audience in a constant uproar.” 36 A production of the Henry Irving vehicle The Bells by the school’s Henry Irving Dramatic Society, merited a preview in the Spokane Daily Chronicle, which published head shots of the three principals, including Bing, bow-tied and grinning.
Bing displayed few signs of discontent that year, holding his own in class while playing baseball for the varsity and the semipro Ideal Laundry teams. He won a Distinguished citation in English and a Premium (second place) citation in debating. Math and chemistry were problematic, and Father Kennelly made a point of saying that he was worried about Bing’s performance in the latter. Bing told him with breezy candor, “Well, Father, there’s no use both of us worrying about it.” Kennelly may have been too thunderstruck to launch his key ring, but he was a lot angrier when he heard noises one night in front of the Administration Building and marched over for a look. He found Bing supervising a pulley system as his confederates inside attempted to lower to the ground, piece by piece, a set of school drums. Bing, who needed them for a last-minute gig, had previously succeeded in borrowing the drums on several occasions. Getting caught convinced him to save up for a set of his own.
Among his summer jobs was a brief stint at Harry’s company, the former Inland Brewery, where he whiled away the time discussing the frustrations of making near beer (they brewed the real article, then “pasteurized it until it was the sissified prohibition stuff”) with an old German braumeister. His job was to roll and upend barrels of cucumbers into the briny vats for pickling, and he hated it. He quit after two weeks and never developed a liking for pickles. He did develop an appetite for true beer, not without inadvertent encouragement from his father, who now and then asked him to “rush the can.” Local speakeasies sold beer in large tin cans with tops and handles, and Harry would give Bing a quarter to fetch one. When Bing siphoned off some of it himself, he would tell Harry that a bunch of kids had chased him and it spilled. That was known as “dropping the can.” One speakeasy Bing knew pretty well was operated by a former fight promoter and con man turned bootlegger. His name was Charles Dale, and he kept the back room of his popular establishment stocked with liquor brought back in suitcases from periodic trips to Butte. Music by bands a lot better than the Dizzy Seven helped Dale lure customers.
Yet notwithstanding an occasional snifter or tin can, Bing hewed to the straight and narrow. Returning for his third year, he enrolled in the School of Law, taking advantage of a program that would confer A.B. and LL.B degrees in six years — two in the College of Arts and Sciences, four in law. His schedule was characteristically full. He attended regular courses in the forenoons and returned to campus five nights a week, between seven and nine, for classes in law. During afternoons, he worked in the office of Charles Albert, an attorney for the Great Northern Railway. Albert’s widow, actress Sarah Truax, repeated her husband’s favorite story about his former clerk, a likable boy who disappeared from the office to rehearse or nail down engagements for his band. Colonel Albert finally insisted that the stage-struck fellow give his full time to show business. When he saw him next, Bing was pulling down $3,000 a week.
Law may have appealed to Bing’s sense of theatricality — it is the one career other than politics that routinely turns out real-life Mr. Interlocutors. In any case, the decision was not made lightly. When Bing registered for law school, he had not been tested as an entertainer or musician outside school productions. Even by high-school standards, the Dizzy Seven was undistinguished. The workload he embraced indicates his determination to make good on his parents’ investment and create his future. Bing buried himself in a curriculum of contracts and quasi-contracts, criminal law, torts, property, logic, procedure (legal bibliography), and debate. Membership in the Debating Society was mandatory for students in the special program, as was attaining thirty credits toward the A.B. He now paid less attention to sports and stagecraft. But working for Colonel Albert brought home the disenchanting truth that lawyering entails more drudgery than drama and was not the instant platform for Ciceronian eloquence suggested by the examples of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Second semester, Bing was back on the boards.
The Spokane Daily Chronicle for February 8, 1923, reported rehearsals for an upcoming performance of George M. Cohan’s Seven Keys to Baldpate, presented by the Gonzaga Dramatic Club with Mike Pecarovich as the lead. Yet the sole accompanying photo was a head shot of Bing (bow tie, big smile), who played the role of Lou Max, “the crooked mayor s man ‘Friday,’ the humorous feature of the cast.” 37 Bing was described as one of the drama club’s “old-timers.” The priest who directed the play selected his cast from the entire student body, reported the Chronicle, for a version of the play Cohan had specially revised for the East Coast Jesuit school, Fordham. In May the Monogram Club presented a sweater to Father Sharp in recognition of his work in assisting Gonzaga sports. An evening of burlesque and music ensued, during which Bing acted in a three-man comedy sketch and sang in unison with the Gonzaga Harmony Trio.
Enrolling in his fourth year, he continued to work part-time for Charles Albert in the afternoons and took an additional job as night watchman for the Great Northern Railway, studying in a room in its tower on Havermale Island. An acute if fleeting depression hit the country that year, and inevitably the Crosbys felt the impact. Harry, who had been listed in the company books as secretary, was once again let go and then rehired as shipping clerk at a reduced salary. Inland now offered commercial storage in addition to “22 Varieties.” The economic shortfall derailed the ambitions of Bing’s eldest sister, Catherine, who upon graduating Holy Names Academy told a reporter that she expected to study music in the East. She remained at home. Everett returned from Seattle and worked as a bookkeeper, but soon left to rejoin the bootlegging trade. Larry worked for the Chronicle, as did Ted, who concluded his education with a bang, editing the Gonzaga Bulletin and graduating from the School of Philosophy of Letters.
Ted never stopped turning out stories, poems, and essays for the college paper. One tale, “Sunny Skies,” tells of an abused wife named Grace Crossland, tormented by a hard-drinking husband and afraid to leave her Westchester mansion. That changes after she visits a dude ranch and meets a cowboy named Hale, who greets people with the phrase “sunny skies.” Hale follows Grace home to New York, dispatches her husband, and returns with her to Rancho Los Pinos. The story is chillingly prophetic: Bing’s wife Dixie suffered a mild form of agoraphobia, rarely leaving their estate, and though Bing was never the brute of Ted’s story, he did drive her away with his drinking early in their marriage. But the truly prescient character is Hale, who emphatically anticipates the public Bing: the cool, capable, optimistic, ail-American go-getter who loves horses, operates ranches, and invariably gets the girl. 38
Bing enjoyed one final theatrical triumph at Gonzaga, when he reprised his role as Ambrose Peale in It Pays to Advertise, in November. What turned out to be his last appearance in a school production netted him his first genuine newspaper review. After praising the Gonzaga Dramatic Club for focusing on plays that allow women’s roles to be “blue pencilled,” to eliminate feminine impersonation (and prove that a drama club can “get along without a woman”), the Spokane Daily Chronicle’s critic praised Pecarovich and Crosby for carrying off “the play’s hilarious moments” and continued: “Mr. Crosby bursts over with spontaneity in getting his amusing lines across the footlights.” 39
Neither school, work, nor drama diminished Bing’s appetite for music. He listened to everything and without prejudice. He belonged to a generation so dazzled by the sheer availability of diverse music that it did not, unlike subsequent generations, distinguish between hip and square, swing or Mickey Mouse. The only criteria that mattered were whether a performance was interesting and well executed. The father of one of Bing’s friends was a record distributor, so many of the latest numbers were available to him. Ted’s crystal machine also got a workout. Above all, Bing and his friends spent hours listening to records at Bailey’s music shop. They stayed until they were thrown out, rarely buying anything. The mid-1920s signaled an electrifying moment in American music. Jazz and blues were not yet codified as strictly defined genres; there was, instead, a general sense of jazziness and bluesiness. Musical influences from everywhere were fermenting into a whole new brew, and no one could imagine where it would lead; every month brought new sounds to marvel at. Paul Whiteman introduced a nervy Gershwin tune called “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise.” Some listeners were delighted by its bold use of a seventh chord, but most fans were more taken with the trumpet solo, which interpolated two twelve-bar blues choruses right in the middle. A fellow making records under the name Ukelele Ike sang bawdy songs with jazz pizzazz and backed himself on hot ukelele and kazoo. Jolson, who had recorded novelties, now introduced more substantial melodies like “April Showers” and “Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’ Bye).” Dance bands paved new ground and gave Whiteman a run for his money — Fred Waring with “Sleep” and Isham Jones with “It Had to Be You.”
Many new songs bore the stamp of the South. A group of Whiteman musicians calling themselves the Virginians scored with “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.” The Peerless Quartet, a perennial on the Crosby gramophone, released “’Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” Arthur Gibbs popularized a new dance with his record of “Charleston.” Not everyone understood the racial collusion taking place in the music world, though many who did were outraged and delivered stringent imprecations. Ladies’ Home Journal located a cause and effect between jazz and rape, and cautioned its readers, “Jazz is the expression of protest against law and order, the bolshevik element of license striving for expression in music.” 40 It wasn’t entirely wrong: jazz was widely associated with people who broke the law by drinking bootleg hooch in speakeasies. Rape was a stretch, but then most of the jeremiads employed the word to hyperbolize the greater threat of women who freely expressed their sexuality. Liquor, Ogden Nash wrote, is quicker, and so a syllogism took root: jazz abets drinking, and drinking abets sex; therefore, jazz abets sex, which practiced under the influence of liquor amounts to rape. That Ladies’ Home Journal failed to hear any musical value in jazz is almost immaterial.
Greater still than the sexual panic was the racial one. To most young people, the hot new music was simply liberating. Few outside the largest cities comprehended how far it went in transgressing the color line. Bing and his friends, for example, probably had no way of knowing that the three songs mentioned above (“I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” “’Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” “Charleston”), though popularized by white bands, were composed by blacks, two of whom were no more southern than Bing. But Crosby had to realize he was witnessing the vanguard of a music brimming with catchy melodies, exciting rhythms, and weird harmonies, an inclusive multicolored all-American music.
Inspired by Ukelele Ike (Cliff Edwards), Bing carried his father’s banjo-uke to outings at Liberty Lake. He never became proficient on it, though he got some mileage from Ike’s other instrument, the kazoo. That autumn Bing finally saved up enough to buy a set of drums from a mail-order catalog. The bass drum had a Japanese sunset painted on the skin, which could be illuminated by a bulb inside; a gooseneck cymbal waved from the rim. Those drums were perhaps the most significant purchase Bing would ever make, because news of their arrival circulated as far as North Central High School, where a student piano player named Alton Rinker led a small band that avoided stock arrangements in favor of charts he copied by ear from the latest jazz records. Rinker had a problem. The drummer was no good, and the other boys let him go before he could find a replacement. So when he heard about a law student who lived nearby on East Sharp, with a new set of traps, he figured he’d give him a call.