7

MUSICALADERS

On the one hand my friends and I would be hunting after the empty show of popularity —theatrical ap plause from the audience, verse competitions, contests for crowns of straw, the vanity of the stage, immoderate lusts — and on the other hand we would he trying to get clean of all this filth by carrying food to those people who were called the “elect” and the “holy ones. “

— Saint Augustine, Confessions (c. 400) ¹

Rinker introduced himself and asked Bing whether he would be interested in trying out with a band at North Central: would he like to bring his drums over to the Rinker home on West Mansfield for their next rehearsal? Bing unhesitatingly said yes. The Dizzy Seven had faded away. Law was losing its attraction, and no one was bidding for his services as a musician. Spokane had plenty of professional drummers playing in dance bands, and Bing was neither good enough nor experienced enough to join the union and compete with them for work. The fact that he, a fourth-year college student, was asked to audition for a bunch of high-school kids did not affront his ego in the slightest. He was game for anything.

Bing did not know Alton Rinker; and as far as Rinker knew, he did not know Bing. But as soon as he opened the door, Alt remembered him. Alt and his brother Miles, who played alto saxophone in the group, had spent countless summer afternoons at the Mission Park pool. “Every time we went swimming there,” Rinker wrote in an unpublished account of his association with Bing, “I would see a young, blond-headed chubby boy, who was older than I. He could swim like a seal and was a good diver off the board. He was well known at the pool and everyone called him Bing.” ²Years had passed and Bing looked older, but he still carried himself with that impressive authority. As Alt introduced him to Miles and the Pritchard brothers, Bob and Clare, he was struck by Bing’s composure and sharp sense of humor. After Bing set up the drums and they ran down a few numbers, everyone was happy. “We knew right away that he really had a beat,” Rinker recalled. ³ Bing exclaimed, “Oh boy, this is great!” ⁴

What was great was the experience of playing music that had some resemblance to the records everyone was listening to. Bob Pritchard played C-melody saxophone, and his brother, Clarence, had a tenor banjo. None of them, including Rinker, could read music, and the only keys they played in were A flat and E flat, which Alt had taught himself on piano: “I don’t know why, but these were black keys and looked easier than the white keys.” ⁵ With his acute ear, however, he could adapt arrangements from records and assign appropriate notes to each musician. Among the records they worked on were Paul Whiteman’s “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” “Whispering,” and “I Love You”; Ted Lewis’s “When My Baby Smiles at Me”; the Mound City Blue Blowers’ “San”; the Cotton Pickers’ “Jimtown Blues”; and anything they could find by the incredibly prolific Dixieland outfit the Original Memphis Five and Ukelele Ike. ⁶ Bing knew the records and had no trouble fitting in. He was so pleased with the group that he stood up from his drum seat and announced he could sing, producing, to prove the point, a tiny blue-spangled megaphone. The boys were impressed. “Now we had a good drummer who could also sing,” Rinker wrote, “and it really turned us all on.” ⁷

In fact, Bing wasn’t much of a drummer, and in later years whenever the subject came up, he liked to quote Phil Harris’s observation that he had a roll wide enough to throw a dog through. He knew the rudiments and could keep time, but his skills as a percussionist were just about equal to the musical talents of the other guys — which isn’t saying much. But they had enthusiasm to spare, especially Alt and Bing, who, unlike the others and unbeknownst to each other, were growing increasingly restless at school.

At first, Alt was concerned about how Bing would feel playing with high-school students. Rinker had just turned sixteen, and Bing was coming up on twenty-one. But the age thing never came up. Perhaps Bing, who had always been a year younger than his friends, liked being the eldest for a change. He established ground rules with Alton early. “I guess I was a little bossy at rehearsals in the way I told the fellows what to play,” Rinker recalled. “I didn’t talk that way to Bing as he was the drummer and didn’t play notes. But after one rehearsal, Bing came over to me and said, You’d better not talk that way to me or I’ll give you a punch in the nose.’ It shook me up and from then on I was careful of how I talked to him at rehearsals.” ⁸

The influence of the Rinkers — first Alt and later his older sister, Mildred — on Bing’s career can scarcely be overstated. His friendship with Alt dominated Bing’s life for nearly seven years, ultimately serving as the catalyst for his departure from Spokane and his decision to pursue a life in show business. The association remained the central experience in Rinker’s professional life, causing him some bitterness when the friendship died and he realized that despite his success as a radio producer and composer, he would be remembered mainly as an appendage to the Crosby story. But in the beginning, Alton and Bing needed each other. Rinker provided the energy and leadership necessary to spur his pal along. Bing offered Rinker companionship and an entrée to his own clique of college boys, filling a need left by the death of Alt’s mother years before and a temporary abandonment by his father. Bing even renamed him, insistently calling him Al, instead of Alt (rhymes with vault). Pretty soon Al’s friends and family followed suit. Though the relationship ended badly, it is impossible to read the unpublished memoir Al wrote shortly before his death without perceiving an unrequited admiration. On the surface, the young men appeared to be two branches off the same tree.

Al was born on December 20, 1907, the third of four children, on a thousand-acre wheat farm sixty miles from Spokane, across the Idaho state line. His mother, Josephine, was half Cour d’Alene Indian, and since the farm was on the reservation, the land had been deeded to her tax-free. The eldest of Al’s siblings was his sister, Mildred, a skillful bareback rider who rode five miles to school every morning on a buckskin pony with their brother Miles clinging to her waist. In the 1930s she would be celebrated as the “Rockin’ Chair Lady,” for her record of the Hoagy Carmichael song “Rockin’ Chair,” and would become almost as well known for her weight as for her swinging birdlike voice. Yet Mildred was a slip of a girl, barely five feet tall; until she was twenty, she weighed less than a hundred pounds. Like the Crosby place, the Rinker home echoed with music. Their father, Charles, played fiddle and called square dances at the community’s occasional socials. His wife, Josephine, a devout Catholic who had studied music with the nuns at Tekoa, was a pianist who played by ear — classics, opera songs, and ragtime, including a favorite of Al’s she called “Dill Pickles.” During the years when the children were young, she sat down at the piano every evening after supper and taught Mildred to play and sing. Al recalled that Mildred favored songs of longing and exotic places, like “Siren of the Southern Seas,” “Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight,” “Araby.”

When Al was five, Charles hired a tenant to run the farm and moved his family to a house on Spokane’s North Side, where he operated an auto-supply shop. Four years later Josephine succumbed to tuberculosis. The distraught widower with four children (including the baby, Charles Jr.) hired and soon married an abusive housekeeper named Mrs. Pierce. “I think he had lost his mind,” Alwrote. “Compared to her, the wicked stepmother in Grimms’ Fairy Tales was a fairy godmother.” ⁹ Mildred loathed her, and at seventeen she packed a bag, kissed her brothers and bid them and her father good-bye, and left for Seattle, where she stayed with an aunt while working as a sheet-music demonstrator at Woolworth’s. She quickly married and divorced Ted Bailey, electing to retain his name because she thought it sounded more American than the Swiss-derived Rinker. As Prohibition went into effect, she began to sing in speakeasies in Seattle and Canada, where she met and married Benny Stafford, a bootlegger.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Pierce issued an ultimatum: Mr. Rinker would have to choose either her and her daughter or his own children. “He must have been under a spell,” Al wrote, “because he finally sent us to the Catholic Academy in Tekoa, Washington.” ¹⁰ The boys were miserable, but whenever their father brought them home, Mrs. Pierce would force him to send them away again. On one occasion when she beat him with a broom, Al hauled off and punched her in the stomach. After that, she agreed to a compromise: Al and Miles were permitted to enroll as boarders at Gonzaga High School. Al began studying piano and found he could pick out tunes by ear and fit appropriate chords to the melody lines — at least if they were in A flat and E flat. Charles Rinker finally shed himself of the wicked stepmother and her daughter, settling a lot of money on them in the process, at which point Alton and Miles returned home and transferred to North Central High.

Even Mildred briefly returned to Spokane, to sing at Charlie Dale’s speakeasy. Alton was too young to see her work there, but she enthusiastically shared with him her collection of records by an exciting new singer, Ethel Waters. ¹¹ Bing apparently did hear Mildred at Dales, though his recollection of her as “the area’s outstanding singing star” was a substantial exaggeration. She appeared locally only once and was little noted; speakeasies were not reviewed. “She specialized in sultry, throaty renditions with a high concentrate of Southern accent, such as ‘Louisville Lou’ and ‘Hard-Hearted Hannah,’” Bing wrote. ¹² She remembered him, too, and in 1941 recalled his early years. “Bing was always a fella to get into trouble,” she said. “I expect he spent every Saturday night of his life in jail. But look at him now. For my money, he’s the best of them all, male or female.” ¹³

Bob and Clare Pritchard were living with their aunt and uncle, not far from the Rinkers, when they decided they wanted to play music. For Christmas 1922, they received instruments — a C-melody saxophone and tenor banjo — and practiced constantly with Al and Miles, as Al worked up arrangements. After six months they knew six tunes. They drafted Fred Healy on drums, and auditioned him on “Wabash Blues.” He sounded okay, but within a few months the Rinkers and Pritchards had improved, while Healy “couldn’t keep a good beat on his drums.” ¹⁴ They broke the news to him and looked elsewhere. Now, with Bing in the group and Miles doubling on clarinet, they rehearsed at Al’s house and played a few high-school dances for money. A student at North Central, Jimmy Heaton, asked if he could play trumpet in the band. Unlike the others, Heaton was an excellent, schooled player; he was the first of the bunch to make a mark in Hollywood, as an ace studio musician. (He played lead trumpet for Alfred Newman on countless 20th Century-Fox scores.)

Heaton gave the small ensemble a brassy spark, encouraging Al to fashion more intricate arrangements. They called themselves the Musicaladers (as in “musical aiders”) and played social gatherings at Odd Fellows Hall, the Elks Club, and the Manito Park Social Club, often with Rinker billed as leader. The Manito job, three dollars a man, was on a Sunday night, and Bing could barely suppress his yawning in law class the next day. His interest in school was fading.

Early in 1924 the band was given a week on the small stage at the Casino Theater and went over well enough to get a repeat engagement. They rented tuxedo jackets and white flannel trousers and thought themselves pros. Bing periodically made his way from the drums to the proscenium to sing such songs as “Alice Blue Gown,” “Margie,” “St. Louis Blues,” and “For Me and My Gal.” Al’s arrangements, adapted from the latest discs, were invariably up-to-date. “Well, he was very good,” Bing said late in life:

He had a great ear for music, he could play pretty near anything after he heard it a time or two, and play the right harmony, too. He’d pick out a part for each instrument. We had piano, banjo, cornet, clarinet, saxophone, and he’d voice all the harmonies for them, just show them the harmonic line to follow, and we’d be playing the same arrangement as on the record. We were quite a novelty around Spokane ’cause we would have arrangements taken from hit records, which we could play. That really made us unique. ¹⁵

The Musicaladers would take any job, anyplace. “We were nonunion,” Bing said. “We had no scale, no minimum, no maximum —whatever we could get. It wasn’t much, but you didn’t need much in those days.” ¹⁶ One engagement they kept secret was at a second-story Chinese restaurant, the Pekin Cafe, a popular if notorious hangout that trafficked in liquor and prostitution. The Pekin offered the Musicaladers a regular job every Friday and Saturday night for good money. “I was able to allay some of my mother’s doubts about the restaurant’s respectability by pointing to its most respectable financial rewards,” Bing recalled. ¹⁷

The fact that Bing was drinking heavily and not always holding it well became obvious one afternoon when he and his friend Edgie Hogle, who tried to manage the Musicaladers, got into trouble. Bing, who had been at Colonel Albert’s office, walked over to Hat Freeman’s hat store, where Edgie clerked. Each put up fifty cents, and Bing walked to an alley a block away where a bootlegger sold dollar pints of popskull, a pernicious moonshine whiskey. Later, back at Hat’s and properly tanked, Bing and Edgie mulled over a vaudeville act they’d seen the previous evening in which a juggler cast hats over the heads of the audience and made them return like boomerangs. By the time the owner returned, four straw hats had sailed out the door. He fired Edgie and banned Bing from the premises.

Bing’s favorite shop, one of his two regular hangouts, was Russ Bailey’s House of Music, a record-and-sheet-music store on the corner of Riverside and Post, next door to the Liberty Theater, Spokane’s first movie house. Ray Grombacher had built the Liberty in 1915 and now owned Bailey s as well. One of his clerks, Johnnie Bulmer, moonlighted as a drummer and led a band at Liberty Lake. During a late-night waltz, he would focus a light on his bass drum, illuminating a florid sunset that, one observer said, “made Maxfield Parrish’s calendars seem somber.” ¹⁸ According to Bulmer, Bing pressed him for help in mastering the latest licks, and Bulmer gave him pointers “to get rid of him.” ¹⁹ Bing noted the striped blazer Johnnie wore at the lake and the way he sang ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas” through a megaphone but did not think much of him as a singer. The feeling was mutual. Bing “always looked like a tramp,” ²⁰ Bulmer groused to a reporter in the 1940s, nursing his envy, for though he chased after the big time, he returned to Spokane an overweight and dyspeptic plumber.

Bing’s key interest in Bailey’s, however, was not Bulmer. He would pick up Al after school at North Central, and the two would bring their banjo-ukes to the store, lock themselves in a booth, and listen to records until closing time. “We practically lived there,” Bing recalled. ²¹ “We used to wait outside Bailey’s music shop for the new records to come in, the Mound City Blue Blowers and the Original Dixieland Band and the Memphis Five and the Cotton Pickers, Jean Goldkette’s band.” ²² Rinker added, “We couldn’t afford to buy [all] the records, so we would buy one, after learning 12 and leave.” ²³ Bulmer’s recollection was not as blithe: “They drove us crazy,” he complained. “They’d play some Whiteman stuff over and over, picking up the arrangements by ear. They never spent a dime, so whenever a customer wanted a booth I’d throw them out.” ²⁴ Ralph Goodhue, who managed the store, agreed — he couldn’t recall them ever buying a record in the hundreds of hours they spent in the glass-enclosed listening room. ²⁵ In 1962 Bing called Bailey’s “our jazz classroom.” ²⁶ It became his only classroom.

The student of Cicero, Ovid, and Augustine; the declaimer of Horatius at the Bridge; the incipient minstrel; the energetic athlete and yell leader; the devout altar boy; the promising mirror of a rigorous Jesuit education was slipping out of Gonzaga’s grasp. The law had not suited him. Had Bing continued in the arts and sciences college, he would most likely have graduated, for he had only two or three months remaining of his fourth year when he dropped out. But in the law school, he faced an additional two years. Kate was on his back, complaining about his slipping grades and lapsed attention, and he bridled, telling her he would rather sing than eat. By spring, Bing was earning more money with the Musicaladers than in Colonel Albert’s office and let everyone know it. He saw no contest between following in the footsteps of his uncle George and executing wage-garnishment forms. For weeks he sat in class, whistling under his breath and practicing a paradiddle with pencils on his desktop. He finally told his parents of his decision to withdraw from Gonzaga.

Art Dussault and others tried to change Bing’s mind, but the future star — showing the stubbornness that became fabled during his years in Hollywood — was immovable. He left school with little warning, having posed with twenty-seven other law students for the 1924 Gonzaga yearbook. Everyone in the picture wears a necktie or cravat, except Bing, who wears a bow tie; with his hair neatly pomaded and parted on the left, he looks conspicuously younger than the others. Several years later he remarked, “I studied law in college and I can truthfully say that the bar of the state of Washington is the only bar I was ever kept out of.” ²⁷ Kate was distraught, Harry encouraging.

Bing was prodded to quit school by Rinker, a reluctant student who did badly in high school and disdained scholastic obligations of any kind, especially those that detracted from the business of music. Al’s enthusiasm spurred Bing’s, and the successes they enjoyed mitigated their doubts about the ensemble’s abilities. Their confidence was not warranted. Jimmy Heaton was the only instrumentalist with real talent. Al’s golden ear did not increase his skill on piano, and Bings musicality was at best unfocused. What kept them running, said an observer, “was their devoted love of jazz and brass balls.” ²⁸ They had discovered the great secret of America’s new popular music: it let everyone in, even those lacking musical education or conventional technique. All you needed was passion, ambition, a good ear. Rinker and Crosby had all three. Creativity would come later.

The Musicaladers belonged to the first generation of young Americans who bought into the Zeitgeist of American popular music through records and a few traveling bands. Among the orchestra leaders passing through Spokane, Vic Meyers, Dwight Johnson, and Abe Lyman spiced their fox-trots and waltzes with jazz. If the captivating new sound was difficult to play well in its toddling stage (only a fraction of the jazz records made during the mid-1920s stand up), it was easy to play badly. The form was methodical, the harmony simple, the rhythm steady — especially as diluted under the Whiteman influence.

With time on their hands in 1924, Bing’s gang found another hangout besides Bailey’s — Benny Stubeck’s Confectionary, which would become a familiar name to Bing’s radio audience. Stubeck, a short, stout Bohemian, ran a corner luncheonette that sold newspapers and tobacco. Though Bing retained warm memories of the shop, its owner remembered him and his light-fingered friends with more tolerance than joy. In 1937 the thirty-four-year-old Bing wrote Stubeck a letter admitting that he had stolen Hershey bars from his store and agreeing to pay up if the bill did not exceed three dollars. Stubeck did not send an invoice, as he explained to a reporter: “What the hell, so he now owes me three bucks. He pays me off with publicity. Christ, he’s mentioned me fifty or a hundred times on the radio. You heard it, ain’t you, saying he’s broadcasting from Benny Stubeck’s poolroom? Always the clown.” Benny recalled Bing as a guy ready with his fists, though not the type to look for a confrontation. “They was all the time getting into fights,” either because they were refused entry to a cabaret or because they were “drunker’n skunks on moonshine” or because of girls. “They was always chasing the chickens,” getting “clapped up,” and coming to Benny, who discreetly arranged for them to see a doctor. ²⁹

Bing’s willingness to fight is much affirmed. On one occasion, a heckler called out, “Hi, pansy,” while he was singing “Peggy O’Neil,” and Bing leaped off the bandstand and chased him outside, where the police intervened. ³⁰ His fondness for adolescent whoring is less well documented, but it may help explain Bing’s widely noted lack of interest in routine dating. The name of only one Crosby girlfriend from the period has come to light, and that because thirty years later her six-year-old nephew sidled up to Bing at Idaho’s Hayden Lake Country Club. As the boy stared up at him, Bing engaged him in conversation and was told that the boy’s aunt Dorothy had been his girlfriend and that the family scrapbook was filled with pictures of them. As the nephew, Jack Sheehan, remembered many years later, Bing responded, “I’ve had affection for lots of pretty ladies, Junior. So you’ve got the goods on me, eh?” A moment later Bing turned to him: “Is your aunt Dorothy Bresnan?” He wrote a note on the back of his scorecard, which was found among Dorothy’s possessions when she died in 1973:

Dear Dorothy,

Greetings to you and yours. I certainly remember you as a lovely girl. I recall the park dance we attended after you were named May Queen. I’m at the lake for a short spell with the boys. They are becoming excellent golfers. Your nephew is a fine young man, not at all shy. All good wishes to you. Love, Bing. ³¹

The scrapbook suggested to Sheehan that the two-year relationship was serious. He surmised that it took place during Bing’s final year at Gonzaga and the ensuing one with the Musicaladers. Rinker recalled nothing of the kind, objecting rather primly that Bing “never seemed to get emotionally involved with girls he dated.” With Bing, everything was “on a casual fun basis.” ³²

For Al, considering his youth, Stubeck’s was a pretty heady experience. He and Bob Pritchard were included in Bing’s adventures because they were in the band and liked to hang out with him. Al remembered the older boys bringing moonshine and partying with local girls (“not what you would call debutantes”) who were considered daring just for taking a swig. ³³ Al got sick once, but Bing could usually hold it. Already known for his “sporty hats and fast quips,” Bing was much admired for his wit, his singing, and his ability to consume rotgut whiskey at a time when Prohibition made drinking a pastime and a sport. Stubeck was not impressed. “Jeez, that was one wild bunch of clowns, always broke,” Benny groused. ³⁴ They kept a jug in his basement, where he allowed the band to rehearse, and at closing time he sometimes found them down there stiff as boards. Benny obviously had a soft spot for Bing and his friends. He was an agent for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and some nights he piled them into the PI truck and drove them home “so they wouldn’t get pinched.” “Goddamn good customers,” Benny later recalled of Crosby and his friends. “Jesus Christ, I can still remember that Bing when he’d walk in and holler, ‘Give me a couple of greasy hamburgers and a malted milk/” ³⁵ Stubeck claimed that Bing later offered him a position with Bing Crosby, Inc.

The Musicaladers’ best and steadiest job followed directly from their scandalous appearances at the Pekin Cafe, where George Lareida Jr. heard them. Lareida and his father co-owned the newly established, hugely successful Lareida’s Dance Pavilion in Dishman, six miles east of Spokane. George Sr. wasn’t overwhelmed by the band at first, but he was duly impressed when an itinerant vaudevillian dropped by for the last show and said of Bing, “That kid’s really got something.” ³⁶ He asked the boys whether they would be interested in working at his place three nights a week. Lareida Jr. recalled Bing blurting out, “Boy, would we!” The Pavilion was an immense and well-run operation in a hangar of a building (formerly an auto showroom, later a roller-skating rink), where the area’s young people went to socialize and dance; it was the first stop on the train out of Spokane. As the band required a car to make its thrice-weekly trips for the summerlong engagement, the six members contributed four or five dollars each to the purchase of a 1916 Model T Ford, without top or windshield.

The bandstand was situated on a platform in the middle of the hall, and everyone danced around it. When Bing sang a ballad, obscuring his face with the megaphone, kids stopped and stared. The repertoire included fox-trots, waltzes, and tangos but was unusually abundant with blues — “St. Louis Blues,” “Beale Street Blues,” “The Wang Wang Blues,” “Stack-o-lee Blues.” Lareida’s was the one place Spokane’s parents generally endorsed. Prohibition was strictly enforced by the teetotaling owners. Anyone who entered the Pavilion intoxicated was asked to leave; bouncers made sure they did. George Lareida and his father allowed for one exception. They knew Bing often drank before he arrived, but Lareida Sr. tolerated his tippling because he rarely let it show. The son knew better, having found Bing passed out in the men’s room near the urinals. “Wake up, you bum, you’ve got to play tonight,” he yelled at him. Bing came to, realized where he was, and grimaced, “Hey, who brung them roses.” ³⁷

On one occasion Bing fell off the bandstand, as he was reminded ten years later, when he wagered a Seattle businessman over the outcome of a fight between a fellow named Handy and a boxer Bing presumably owned an interest in. The businessman wrote Bing that he had met someone from Spokane who offered to “make a little side bet that [Handy] at least doesn’t fall off the platform such as in the instance of one of your early crooning experiences at Lareida’s Dance Pavilion, Spokane, years ago. Should I cover this bet for you, or should I just let it drop?” ³⁸ Bing’s response is not known.

Bing was indulged because he was liked. Lareida thought Al “cold and even a little haughty” but enjoyed Bing and called him the Lip in tribute to his nonstop verbal dexterity. ³⁹ “When you see Bing chewing the fat with [Bob] Hope,” he said, “that’s the fellow he was.” ⁴⁰ The Musicaladers, excepting Heaton, posed for a photograph used in Lareida’s ads. For his first important publicity shot, Bing sat up front beside a tom-tom, holding Miles Rinker’s clarinet, wearing the band’s latest uniform, a loud, high-buttoned striped blazer and bow tie, smiling boyishly. Seated next to him is Clare Pritchard with his banjo. Bob Pritchard, his alto in hand, stands to Clare’s right, his left leg crooked back like a chorine’s. Behind them, in darker striped jackets and bow ties, are Miles with his alto and Al, the youngest of the five, looking the most mature. The aggressive glint in Al’s eyes contrasts with the smiling cherubs around him. They look pleased, despite their uniformly scuffed shoes. But their appeal to dancers proved unexceptional, and the job led to few others. On the day of Bing’s death, George Lareida said, “He was an awful nice fellow”: through all the intervening years, Bing had never failed to send him a Christmas card. ⁴¹

The Musicaladers lasted about eighteen weeks at Lareida’s, and they never had another job remotely as good. But they kept plugging until the spring of 1925, though exactly how the year after their biggest engagement was spent is lost to memory. Bing and Al ignore it in their accounts, published and unpublished, skipping directly to the dissolution of the band. After Lareida’s, Bing wrote, the band skirted by with “whatever we could get” — that is, whatever Edgie Hogle could line up, mostly dances and parties. That the group was losing its steam is clear. It must have been a trying year for Bing, the only member of the band with time to burn. Al was on the verge of flunking out of school, but the others — except Heaton, who had the promise of band work in Los Angeles — were bound for college. Bing hired on as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway, yet continued to spend much of his time hanging around North Central, trying to generate interest in rehearsals and work. Except for Al, the other guys were more concerned with graduating.

Other than Frank Corkery, according to the account by Ted and Larry, Bing now socialized mostly with boys at North Central. Among his drinking partners, Dirk Crabbe best shared his sense of humor and verbal inventiveness. Benny Stubeck’s and Russ Bailey’s occupied many days, and vaudeville and silent movies occupied many evenings. The first recordings by Bennie Moten out of Kansas City arrived at the shop and became great favorites for a few weeks. Al’s home life improved: his father remarried, this time to a “lovely” widow from Stockholm with a conservatory background, who schooled Al in classical music. ⁴² But Al gravitated to the Crosby home, where he grew fond of Catherine and Mary Rose, whom he had known slightly at school. He recalled that the Crosby house was sparsely furnished, a reflection, he surmised, of the difficulty Mr. Crosby had making ends meet. Al liked Harry (“His dad was anything-goes, a nice guy, Irish guy”), ⁴³ but not Kate (“a real matriarch, ugh, very strict disciplinarian on Catholicism”) ⁴⁴ He and Bing practiced at the piano, and Bing surprised him by comfortably singing E and F, high for a baritone.

By spring 1925 the band was kaput. After graduation, Jimmy Heaton moved to Los Angeles. Miles was heading for the University of Illinois, and the Pritchards were planning to attend Washington State; all had lost interest in being Musicaladers. “Bing and I were left alone,” Al ruminated. ⁴⁵They became avid golfers, playing with old wood-shafted irons, hickory-shafted woods, and repainted golf balls on a public course at Downriver Park. Al was seventeen and Bing almost twenty-two. For two dollars each, they bought the Model T from the other four boys and stored it in a vacant lot adjacent to the Crosby house. George Lareida was under the impression that they planned to leave Spokane in the spring (he recalled his father giving the boys tires for the trip) but thought they changed their minds when they landed a job at the Clemmer Theater. His memory is not supported by other accounts, however, and the possibility seems unlikely, because Bing and Al had not yet figured out what to do musically in the absence of a band. They learned that at the Clemmer.

Doc Clemmer’s theater, at Sprague and Lincoln, had become something of a Spokane institution in the ten years since it was built. The Clemmer was the city’s second movie theater, dated only by Ray Grombacher’s Liberty, which had opened four weeks earlier. A square four-story building in the neoclassical style of 1915, enviably located across from the luxurious Davenport Hotel, its ornamented off-white brick facade and pillars masked an elaborate interior. Howard S. Clemmer, a dentist turned showman, believed a theater had moral responsibilities and in 1918 persuaded Spokane County to ban The Birth of a Nation as “detrimental to the best ends of patriotism.” ⁴⁶ He was much admired for his policy of “juvenile edification” and his Saturday-morning children’s hour never failed to attract less than a capacity audience of 900. He wrote and published The Klemerklink, a loose-leaf illustrated book that he handed out a page per week to the kids as part of the nickel admission. Doc was a character. He was concerned about redheaded boys, whom he believed bore a “cross of affliction.” His Red-Head Club offered free admission and transportation to and from the theater to preteens who suffered that malady; he hired only redheaded boys as ushers. When their ranks were thinned by the war, he announced his willingness to hire redheaded girls, but that drastic step was averted when an official of the YMCA advised him of the surfeit of unemployed boys. ⁴⁷

Clemmer had little use for live entertainment, especially jazz. His impact on Bing’s life was significant but entirely circumstantial: in March of 1925, just as the Musicaladers were disbanding and Bing and Al were turning to golf, he and his silent partner sold the theater to Universal Pictures. If he had not made the sale, it is almost certain that Bing and Al would have gone separate ways, with what effect on American popular music one can scarcely imagine.

Universal took over on May 1, installing R. R. (Roy) Boomer as manager and approving expenses for a new marquee, carpet, and lighting. ⁴⁸ Boomer was brought in from San Francisco, where a combination of vaudeville and movies was fashionable. In Spokane he was considered, in Bing’s words, “a progressive type, for stage shows were pioneer stuff then.” ⁴⁹ The gala May 9 reopening offered Universal’s The Phantom of the Opera and a few live acts. Boomer had been scouting for local talent to provide entr’actes between pictures. Bing and Al heard about his inquiries and were determined to audition. But what could they do? They had no band and little confidence in themselves as a duo. Neither one suggested the obvious: a voice-andpiano team. Instead, they drafted three pals, including a boy soprano, and offered themselves as a vocal group, with Al playing piano in the pit. Boomer took them on, assigned them songs, and staged them before a Norwegian tableau.

Boomer proved to have the vision Crosby and Rinker lacked. He tired of their act and fired all the singers save one. “Why, I don’t know,” Al wrote half a century later. “I guess he saw something in Bing. Perhaps his singing and personality.” ⁵⁰ Boomer also retained Al as accompanist. In what amounted to a shotgun wedding, Bing and Al were finally forced to come up with an act on their own. This time Boomer did not assign them songs; he allowed them to choose. As much as they needed the job, Bing was nervous about accepting it. He had never before sung to paying customers on an otherwise bare stage.

For their first show, with Al in the pit, Bing walked out and delivered a reasonably assured rendition of “Red-Hot Henry Brown,” a new tune they had picked up from records by the prolific Irving Kaufman and the Ray Miller Orchestra (including C-melody saxophonist Frank Trumbauer and pianist Tom Satterfield, who two years later would be their bandmates). The audience responded encouragingly, and Bing proceeded with a ballad, “Save Your Sorrow (for Tomorrow),” taken from another Ray Miller record (lyric by Buddy DeSylva, a Jolson songwriter who went on to produce Going My Way). The ballad relaxed him, allowing him to purr and trill his high notes, and the reception was warmer still. After two more songs, Bing left the stage, applause ringing in his ears. Boomer was satisfied and told Bing he had the job.

During the next week or so, Bing sang the same songs show after show, but he never got used to having the stage to himself. Everything about his musical drive (the polyphony of jazz) and wit (the banter of vaudeville) demanded a partner he could engage in harmony or horseplay. The situation at hand was more like the sodality meetings at which he sang “One Fleeting Hour.” At parties, he and Al had often sung together: Why couldn’t they do that now? They would work out a few routines, inject more pizzazz into the show. Bing was so insistent that Boomer agreed to give them a try. But they could not put the piano on the stage, as it would interfere with the projection of movies. Since the pit was shallow, almost level with the orchestra seats, Bing came down from the stage.

Until this point, Bing and Al had worked chiefly from the music of others, copying arrangements and adapting them to the instrumentation of the Musicaladers or offering a conventional recital of familiar songs. Their most fanciful performances had taken place at parties. Invariably, their audiences were dancing, drinking, or otherwise distracted. At the Clemmer, none of the usual formulas would avail. They had to devise an act. Situated with the stage at their backs and an audience out front waiting for the movie to begin, they were expected to fill some fifteen or twenty minutes. What did they perform? Al thought the numbers included “Mary Lou,” “Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home,” and “I’m Gonna Charleston Back to Charleston,” but he probably confused the 1925 Clemmer engagement with one a year later at the Liberty. (The first two songs were published in the interim.) “I’m Gonna Charleston” may have figured in the Clemmer shows, though not at the beginning; a favorite of bass saxophonist Adrian Rollini, who recorded three versions that summer, the little-remembered song was cowritten by Roy Turk, among whose subsequent hits was Bing’s theme, “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.” Whatever they sang, they went over big. Al said Boomer told them, “You guys are great. Let’s keep it this way.” ⁵¹ He paid each of them thirty dollars a week.

They continued for nearly five months at the Clemmer. One of the most ornately detailed theaters in the Northwest, the place was an acoustical gem ideally suited to Bing’s particular vocal projection. A blue, purple, and gray fretwork board — touched with gilt, suspended by wires, and thought to be the first of its kind in any theater — focused the sound while concealing the organ loft and its four-manual, 3,000-pipe Kimball pneumatic organ. The mammoth instrument, which could simulate the range of a forty-four-piece orchestra, was used for intermission solos, recitals, and movie scores. ⁵² The celebrated Jesse Crawford had played the Clemmer organ from 1915 until 1917, before moving on to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood and the Paramount in New York. While Bing and Al were in residence, the instrument was temporarily silenced.

From where the two performers stood, in the pocket of a gently dipping auditorium, they saw a perfect dollhouse enclosure illuminated by no fewer than 1,600 incandescent lamps. Directly above the orchestra was a splendid teal dome ornamented with octagons in gold and beige against a burgundy ceiling. Designer E. W. Houghton had generously dabbed the entire structure with vivid effects and colors. The vestibuled rotunda glimmered with hidden lighting. The floor was a tiled mosaic, the wainscoting marble, the chairs in the eight balconied boxes Austrian oak upholstered in mulberry velour. The “women’s retiring room” was furnished with Louis XIV pieces, blue Wilton carpet, cretonne draperies, a telephone desk, and a davenport, lit by beams from alabaster urns trimmed with ivory. Men were relegated to a basement smoking room, situated below the stage, which doubled as a dressing room for performers.

In this setting, Bing and Al gradually honed an act. Al did not have a distinctive voice. He tended to sing high, from the throat rather than from the diaphragm. But he had drive and accurate pitch, and the more the two rehearsed, the more adept they became at harmonizing. They were making it up as they went along, with few examples to follow. Quartet singing had developed out of standard barbershop blends, reaching a popular apex in the recordings of the Peerless Quartet. But the jazzy requirements of an impromptu duet left them to their own devices. The devices they knew best included the hotcha burbling of Ukelele Ike, the florid emoting of Al Jolson, the guttural attack of the blues, and the sentimental wailing of Irish tenors. The minstrel traditions allowed them to try on the masks of black and southern singing, but they were smart enough to distinguish masks from life. In life, they were a couple of young Northwestern Catholics with smooth voices and much energy who had seen very little of the world.

Bing saw no conflict between the blues and Irish tenors, nor was he hampered by a bias in one direction or the other. His key attribute as a troubadour of American song was his capacious appreciation for its diversity, his disposition to follow music wherever it led. He knew instinctively that as long as he kept in mind who he was, he could make any style his own. Al emulated his lead, blending his thin baritone against Bing’s poised baritone. Soon they developed a presentation unlike any other. They were buoyant, ingenuous, youthfully appealing.

The adventurous team attempted many variations, encouraged by the generous support of the Clemmer audience, which often included old friends like Art Dussault, who came with a contingent of Gonzagans to cheer them on. ⁵³ Bing brought his drums along once, but that didn’t work. Eventually, he eliminated the traps except for a stand-up cymbal. They used kazoos on some pieces and worked up a primitive style of unison scat — a da-de-ta da-de-ta — that was rhythmic and novel. Tenors ruled the theater circuit in part because their high, keening voices could easily reach the balcony’s last row. Bing had his megaphone but soon realized that the Clemmer’s acoustics obviated its need. Besides, people wanted to see his face. The personableness that delighted Bing’s friends readily translated to the stage. Bing and Al had plenty of pep, but they also had something most tyro performers lack: charm. They represented Jazz Age bravura in an unthreatening incarnation while offering contemporaries a musical style of their own. When Bing wrapped his gorgeous voice around a ballad, he made familiar lyrics sound fresh and original.

Most of their songs were not familiar. With Bailey’s music shop at their disposal, they prided themselves on learning the latest numbers as soon as they arrived in town. Immediately after Gene Austin introduced (on a double-sided smash hit) “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” and “Sleepy Time Gal,” Bing and Al adapted and performed them. Wilbur Hindley, drama editor of the Spokesman-Review in the 1920s, remembered: “The team of Rinker and Crosby rapidly built up a substantial following. They were often heard at the old Clemmer Theater where they were great favorites — good looking, pleasant appearing chaps with ingratiating smiles and an original method of putting over their songs.” ⁵⁴ Yet for every song they used to showcase their growing skill and enterprise, they were required by management to do another to set the mood for the picture show. Bing described that type of song as a “prologue”: a sea chanty for a sea movie, a cowboy song for a western, an exotic aria for a movie depicting Hindustan or Araby. ⁵⁵ The boys were responsible for finding such tunes, and the exercise proved valuable to Bing, increasing his store of and respect for diverse material. In his 1941 movie Birth of the Blues, Bing re-created the Clemmer experience, crooning “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” with an illustrative slide projected on a screen.

The Clemmer had other live entertainment in those months, including singing and jazz piano contests with which Bing and Al had no connection. The most renowned entertainer to perform was the female impersonator Julian Eltinge, whose only appearance in a sound film was facilitated by Bing (along with that of several other faded vaudevillians he admired in his early years) in his 1940 picture, If I Had My Way Still, by October Roy Boomer and Universal Pictures had decided to return to a movies-only policy. The mid-1920s were among the most successful in Hollywood history. The Jazz Age introduced a new style in picture stars; in addition to the abidingly popular Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Pickford, there was sexy Clara Bow and virtuous Colleen Moore, sleek Rudolph Valentino and scary Lon Chaney. Theater managers needed no come-ons to keep their patrons loyal and satisfied.

Once again Bing and Al were unemployed, but this time with a difference. As a Spokane reporter wrote ten months after they left town for California, “all Spokane knew ‘Bing’ and close behind him followed the ever-faithful ‘Al.’” They were established as a team, and they had something to sell. The market in Spokane offered little promise, and they were itching to escape what Bing perceived as the smothering provincialism of the “cornfeds.” ⁵⁶ Bing told Charles Thompson, his authorized biographer, that he was so restless, he applied unsuccessfully for a berth as an entertainer on China-bound ships. ⁵⁷ If this is true — and it seems unlikely — he must have felt sufficiently confident to part with Al and sufficiently discouraged to follow the maritime path of his ancestors. Actually, Los Angeles was the obvious destination. Al’s sister lived there with her bootlegger husband. Everett Crosby was there, too, affiliated with a trucking company that carted hooch. With two siblings already situated, the newcomers were assured of temporary places to stay. Mildred had written Al that she was singing in a speakeasy and doing well. Al figured that she probably knew people who could get them started. He suggested the journey to Bing, who jumped at the idea: “Okay, let’s go.” ⁵⁸

Bing secured his parents’ reluctant blessing. Kate had been hard on him for quitting law — her attitude was another reason to skip Spokane. But she and Harry were more equivocal than irate when Bing, who was twenty-two, announced his decision. Years later Harry said, “About the only thing I remember of those times was the day that Bing told us he and Al were going to leave home and go to California in their rickety, painted-up, joke-covered Ford. Mother and I hated to see him leave, but we didn’t want to stand in the way of any possible success for him. We thought that such a move might be the beginning for him. We knew he had talent. As it turned out, it was the beginning for him.” ⁵⁹

Al’s father and stepmother were concerned because he was so young, but they held their tongues. Al had repeatedly proved himself nothing if not resourceful, and with Bing at his side he could at least count on a memorable adventure, whether or not the move actually led to anything. Al took the Model T to a mechanic for last-minute repairs, after confirming with Bing that he would pick him up the next morning, October 15. The idea of embarking on a road trip of some thousand miles in a machine as ramshackle as theirs did not seem especially perilous. The Tin Lizzy was, in Al’s words, “uncomplicated but dependable.” ⁶⁰ It had three floor pedals (stop, low gear, and reverse), an accelerator on the steering wheel, and a crank and pullout choke out front. The tires were narrow tubes without tread. On the canvas covering the spare a slogan was painted: EIGHT MILLION MILES AND STILL ENTHUSIASTIC. ⁶¹ Bing and Al pooled about fifty dollars each, all they had from their Clemmer savings.

Al suffered a nervous, restless night, but he was up with the dawn that wintry Thursday morning. He had decided to postpone his goodbyes until he picked up Bing, since they had to pass the Rinker house on the way out of town anyway. He pulled up to Sharp Avenue at nine, only to learn from Kate that the habitual early riser was dead asleep. She told Al to go upstairs and wake him. He did, annoyed by Bing’s seeming nonchalance. Bing finally came downstairs with his suitcase, and he and Al carried his drums and golf clubs to the car. As they emerged from the house, a small crowd began to congregate and quickly grew as the two young men packed everything into the backseat.

One neighborhood girl recalled the scene: “It was early in the morning and all of us kids were around. Mrs. Crosby brought out a sack lunch for the boys and when the Ford wouldn’t start, Al and Bing borrowed a screwdriver from Mrs. Crosby’s sewing kit to fix it.” ⁶² After driving to retrieve Al’s suitcase and say good-bye to Mr. Rinker and his wife, they made one last stop at a service station at Boone and Division, where the attendant, an old friend, provided them with a free tank of gasoline. They continued down Division, then turned west toward Seattle, 200 miles away. In a short while, they were up to speed: thirty miles per hour and still enthusiastic.