8

VAUDEVILLE

Crosby and Rinker —Two Boys and a Piano —Singing Songs Their Own Way.

—billing, Paramount-Publix (1926) ¹

It took two days to reach Seattle and another three weeks to make Los Angeles. In later years the often recounted trip was invariably dramatized as the archetypal tale of the Road to Hollywood: a plucky journey of two young men in a rickety outmoded contraption, puttering toward glory. But as they traveled, the recording industry was also taking leaps ahead that would revolutionize communications technology, preparing the way for Bing’s ascendancy. Great advancements were ushered in during the very weeks they were on the road. Indeed, the recording industry’s dramatic conversion from acoustical to electrical reproduction of music practically coincided with their departure from Spokane. That innovation, which dominated the industry for more than two decades (until the introduction of tape), would help bring Bing’s strengths into the spotlight, leading directly to the advancement of his true instrument, the microphone.

More than any other performer, Crosby would ride the tide of technology. He dominated records, radio, and movies throughout a career that would parallel the development of those media in ways ever more suitable to emphasize his talents. Boosted by technology in the beginning, Bing eventually became its advocate and master: In the mid-1940s, he single-handedly transformed radio from a live medium into a canned, or prerecorded, one. Later, the TV industry followed suit. It was through the growth and expansion of electronic media that Bing became so familiar, so prized, so beloved a presence in American life. But the technology never diminished his natural ability to connect with an audience. Near the end of his life, when Bing hit the road for an international tour, many of his older fans were astonished to realize that they had not seen him perform live in four decades.

The year 1925 proved a watershed in the brief and shaky history of the recording business, which, like so much of the communications technocracy, traced its origins to the Wizard of Menlo Park. In 1877 Thomas Edison built a machine that engraved sound on a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil. He called it a phonograph — a neologism from the Greek for “sound writer.” But the invention was barely adequate for reproducing a speaking voice, let alone music, and Edison lost interest and turned his attention to the incandescent lamp, thereby missing — as Roland Gelatt, the industry’s influential historian, points out — an opportunity to record such contemporaries as Jenny Lind and Franz Liszt, not to mention Buddy Bolden, the first widely recognized jazz musician. Edison’s apparatus rested for nearly a decade, until Alexander Graham Bell financed and patented what he called the graphaphone, substituting waxed cardboard for tinfoil to achieve far greater clarity. The American Graphaphone Company saw the machine as primarily a Dictaphone, but it renewed the interest of Edison and others, and in 1890 the first commercial recordings were manufactured. They played two minutes, could not be reproduced, and were about as musical as a seance is conversational.

Tremendous improvements were made throughout the 1890s, including the innovation of flat discs and a lateral moving stylus, which its inventor, Emile Berliner, called a gramophone. ² By 1902 the recently formed Victor Talking Machine Company dazzled consumers with mechanical reproductions of the voices of Caruso and Bert Williams. Yet over the next twenty-three years, the recording process remained essentially unchanged. It was acoustical and manual, and demanded of musicians and singers that they perform into mawlike horns mounted on walls. In 1906, the year Harry Crosby bought his family one of the first phonographs in Spokane, Victor recorded Caruso with an orchestra and manufactured the Victrola, a machine conceived as musical furniture for the home, not unlike a piano. At $200, the Victrola cost more than a used automobile. To be sure, phonographs that did not conceal their workings in mahogany consoles were readily available for less than thirty dollars, but Victor’s hot new model for the Park Avenue set reflected a class distinction in the industry’s competing systems. The well-to-do bought superior flat discs, while working-class people like the Crosbys continued to buy cylinders until they were no longer manufactured. Cylinders averaged twenty-five to thirty-five cents; discs between one and seven dollars.

John Philip Sousa initially decried “the Menace of Mechanical Music,” predicting that “a marked deterioration in American music” would follow as generations of amateurs who had sung and played instruments would now presumably give way to indolent disciples of “canned music.” ³ The public disagreed and eagerly purchased everything that was offered, an indiscriminate potpourri of indifferently performed popular music, classics, opera, marches, ragtime, comedy. Records were sold in appliance shops that sold phonographs and in general or grocery stores. In March 1917 Victor announced its imminent release of “the very latest thing in the development of music” —jazz, as played by a spirited, hoked-up white band from New Orleans, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. “Livery Stable Blues” sold more than a million copies. As Europe reeled from the chaos of the Great War, Americans giddily enjoyed their new role on the world stage. The nation’s new confidence resonated in jazz and in a sumptuous dance music played by large orchestras that were at once erotic and genteel. Small independent record companies like Gennett (a subsidiary of Starr Piano) and Paramount (a subsidiary of Wisconsin Chair) put an end to the monopoly enjoyed by Victor and Columbia and generated a musical boom. Between the surging record sales and Prohibition — the government’s gift to jazz, guaranteeing work to numberless musicians in speakeasies throughout the land — America was spellbound by the new, raucous, undeniably homegrown music.

With an assist from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories of swains and flappers, the era was inescapably called the Jazz Age, but it is important to remember that in those years jazz — construed as either an exciting or devilish dance music — had a more inclusive meaning than it later acquired. “Livery Stable Blues” was labeled “For Dancing,” and even legendary innovators like King Oliver and James P. Johnson played for dancing. Everything with a beat and bluesy tonality was regarded as jazz, from the behemoth orchestras of Paul Whiteman and Vincent Lopez to the rhythm songs and ballads of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.

Jazz and black music, not for the last time, rescued the record business in the dim deflationary year of 1920. More than 2 million phonographs had been turned out in 1919, a case of overproduction that brought Columbia to the brink of ruin; its stock sank from 65 to 15/8. The public had grown jaded. The Victrola of 1921 was not much different from that of 1906, nor was popular music, as represented by faceless singers like Billy Murray, the Irish American tenor who recorded hundreds of ditties during the century’s first three decades. Blandness in singers who specialized in making records (and had little reputation outside recording studios) was regarded as an asset by songpluggers and publishers who thought of them as little more than shills for sheet music, where the real money was. By contrast, concert performers who made records also helped sell songs, but they were primarily interested in selling themselves.

In 1920 a thirty-six-year-old vaudevillian with a loyal following in Harlem was invited to spell Sophie Tucker at a recording session. Her name was Mamie Smith, and backed by a white orchestra, she was the first African American woman to record the blues and score a major hit. The success of “Crazy Blues” opened doors for black performers, song publishers, and record-company executives. Mamie was not a true blues singer, but she set the table for many, like Bessie Smith (no relation), who were. By 1925 hundreds of blacks had recorded, and the wild, rambling diversity of American voices represented on discs enthralled listeners of Bing’s generation, white and black, who found their souls in the simmering footloose rhythms. Aside from the exposure it gave him to a wider range of vocalists and styles, the primitive acoustical technology did not serve Bing, a baritone in a world of tenors, who achieved the clearest articulation when singing into the mounted morning-glory horns that predated more sophisticated microphones.

Electronic recording had been discussed for two decades, but it could not be implemented without a condenser microphone and vacuum-tube amplifier. The need for wireless communication during World War I generated experiments that led to their invention, yet at the end of the war nothing was done to extend their usefulness. Although singers like Bing depended on megaphones to enrich and enlarge their voices, record companies saw no need to change their methods until declining sales signaled the need for improved products. On Armistice Day 1920, the Unknown Warrior burial service in Westminster Abbey was transmitted electronically over telephone lines to a recording machine in another building, an achievement that encouraged further tests. But still the record companies declined to explore the possibilities — until 1924, when prototypes were built for electrical systems that expanded frequency ranges in treble and bass, captured room ambience, and heightened dynamics. Even those improvements, developed by Bell Laboratories, were resisted by the established record companies, which thought the electrical process too much like their hated rival, radio. They capitulated within a few months.

The first electrical recordings were released in the spring of 1925. Many critics and musicians complained about distorted sound that lacked the acoustic method’s purity. But modifications were made over the course of the year. Endorsements by Toscanini and Stokowski, as well as Sousa, who had long since become an enthusiastic and well-paid endorser of records, helped convert the skeptics. The Victor Talking Machine Company grandly designated November 2, 1925, Victor Day, to crown the blizzard of publicity ballyhoo that preceded the launch of its electric Orthophonic Victrola. Within days Victor was swamped with orders exceeding $20 million.

As noted, another innovation also helped pave Bing’s way. One of the most significant corollaries of electric recording was the perfection of the microphone. In 1924 President Coolidge’s address to Congress was miked for broadcast, but beyond radio and electrical records, microphones were rarely used in live performances. According to an old theatrical shibboleth, an entertainer who could not project to the balcony’s last row was not ready for the big time; Jolson exemplified the leather-lunged belter of songs. With the arrival of the microphone — and instant exit of the preposterous megaphone — a new and more intimate kind of singing for larger audiences was made possible. Technology changed music. Ironically, mechanics led to a more human and honest transaction between singers and their listeners.

Radio, which now rivaled the phonograph as the preferred mode of home entertainment, was on the verge of the first consolidation of stations. Plans were under way to create a network of local transmitters linked by telephone wires. A year later, in November 1926, the National Broadcasting Company would make its debut, followed the next year by that of the Columbia Broadcasting System. By the time Bing was ready for radio, radio was waiting for the voice made to order to showcase the closeness it could provide. Motion pictures, too, were remade by the new technology. Twenty-four hours before Victor Day, with relatively little publicity, Harry Warner — on behalf of the fledgling motion picture company Warner Bros. — bought control of Vitagraph and its research into sound on film. Talkies would engender not only the movie musical but a subtler and more intimate style of acting. Bing’s naturalness would fit in perfectly.

Victor Day found Bing and Al on the last lap of their mud-splattered journey to Hollywood, contending with an increasingly wheezy engine and patched-up, withered tires. In later years they disagreed about many details of their epic three-and-a-half-week road trip, but they differed little on the salient points: they sang nonstop while driving, worked when possible at parties and roadside joints, and saved board money with an old show-business dodge — renting a single room and sneaking the second man in after dark. Their stay in Seattle, early on, was auspicious. They boarded there with a friend of Bing’s from Gonzaga, Doug Dykeman, who took them to the Hotel Butler to meet Vic Meyers, one of the best-known orchestra leaders in the state of Washington. (Later he was better known as the state’s lieutenant governor, elected to his surprise with help from a facetious campaign conducted by Larry Crosby, in which Meyers donned a white sheet à la Gandhi and promised to install hostesses on streetcars; after his victory, he reneged.) ⁴

Jackie Souders led the Hotel Butler’s band that weekend, and Meyers asked him to give the boys a chance. ⁵ Meyers and Souders were each well established in Washington. Bing and Al had heard their records broadcast in Spokane. Souders’s recordings from that time were representative of white jazz in the provinces, with a passable rhythm section (de rigueur banjo and slap bass), clumsy instrumental soloists, and nasal tenors with small, fey voices. The fact that the singers are more outmoded than the soloists and arrangements is in large measure a consequence of Crosby’s impact. Soon he would put most of those singers out of work. Astute bandleaders in 1925 could not have failed to recognize his lucid individuality. Souders agreed to let them show their stuff.

Al took his place at the piano, and Bing stood by him with a cymbal in hand. They sang in unison on the hot rhythm numbers and featured Bing on a couple of Irving Berlin ballads. The college students, who regularly packed the place on weekends, responded enthusiastically. Next to Bing’s full-bodied emoting, the singing of Souders’s regular vocalist, Walton McKinney, must have sounded drearily anemic. Both Souders and Meyers made competitive offers to the duo to stick around and work with their bands. Bing and Al discussed the bids that evening, but they were flush with their first triumph outside Spokane and resolved to soldier on to Los Angeles.

By Al’s account they bypassed Portland, heading down the inland road through Oregon and the Siskiyou Mountains to California. Bing, however, recalled hitting Portland as well as Medford, Klamath Falls, and San Francisco. On the way, they alternated between fixing punctures and singing. Al wrote, “Bing would sing the melody and I would harmonize. The song ‘Dinah’ was one of our favorites and we really gave it a good workout.” ⁶ But as they got closer to their goal, Al privately began to worry. He had never written his sister, Mildred, to tell her they were coming and did not know how she would greet them.

Driving 1,200 miles down the coast, they tried to average 200 miles a day. On cold mornings the car would not start, and they took turns with the crank. They went to a movie in Sacramento and were astonished at how much larger (2,000 seats) the theater was than the Clemmer; they marveled at the lavish Fanchon and Marco stage show, with its dancers, singers, chorus line, and emcee. “It was impossible for us to imagine, as we sat in that great big beautiful theater and watched those talented entertainers perform, that in a few months we would be up on that same stage singing our songs,” Al remembered. ⁷ Next morning they reached the San Joaquin Valley, driving past cotton fields and orange groves as the temperature climbed and then heading on to Fresno, Stockton, and Bakersfield, where a gas jockey warned them it was ninety miles to Los Angeles, mostly mountainous, and their jalopy might not make it. But what choice did they have? They switched into low gear and skulked the steep mountain road out of Bakersfield.

At the top of Wheeler Ridge, the flivver either blew and was abandoned (Bing) ⁸ or held up for the three hours it took to get to the outskirts of Los Angeles (Al: “We made it, but just barely”), ⁹ where they searched for Sunset Boulevard. They knew Mildred lived a couple of blocks off the thoroughfare, at 1307 North Coronado. It was Saturday afternoon, November 7, when they walked up to her door and nervously knocked. A short, heavyset woman answered and squinted at them for an uncertain moment until Al said, “Don’t you know me? I’m your brother Alt.” They had not seen each other in nearly three years. “[Mildred] let out a holler and put her arms around me. She was so surprised she couldn’t believe it was me.” ¹⁰ Al introduced Bing while noting silently the weight she had gained. They described their trip and their ambitions, and she offered them a spare bedroom, suggesting that they store Bing’s drums in the cellar (where they remained until he sold them a few weeks later). As she prepared lunch, Mildred asked Al about their father and his new wife, Elsa. Al reassured her of their happiness and said that Elsa was taking good care of their brothers. Mildred, in turn, told him about her husband, Benny, who was doing well in the bootleg business. As for herself, she was singing at a speak near Hollywood operated by a friend of hers, Jane Jones. After describing the high-class customers and good tips, she invited them to tag along.

At twilight Mildred, whom Bing instantly took to calling Millie, made cocktails and asked them to sing. In a flash they were at the piano. After a couple of tunes, she walked over and hugged and kissed each of them. “You guys are great,” she said. “You should have no trouble getting something going for yourselves.” ¹¹ After another drink they asked her to sing. Millie sat at the piano and sang Irving Berlin’s “Remember” and Nora Bayes’s old hit “Just Like a Gypsy,” with, Al recalled, “the same feeling and style which later on would make her a star. I could see that Bing was really impressed, and I was very proud of my sister.” Benny Stafford returned in time for dinner and then drove them to Jane Jones’s speakeasy in the Hollywood Hills. ¹² The boys liked Benny, thought him “a regular guy”

Bing Crosby graduated from Gonzaga High School with a diploma in classical studies in 1920. Mark Scrimger Collection

Bing practicing his swing at age four. Mark Scrimger Collection

Bing’s mother, the former Kate Harrigan, during the years in Tacoma. Mark Scrimger Collection

The infant Bing in Tacoma, with his aunt (Kate’s sister, Annie Walsh) on the steps of the Crosbys’J Street home. Mark Scrimger Collection

Looking sporty at the new Sinto Avenue house in Spokane, Bing is hugged by his sister Mary Rose. Mark Scrimger Collection

Six of the Crosbys on Sinto Avenue: left to right, Catherine, Kate (mother), Bing, Mary Rose, Harry (father), Ted. Mark Scrimger Collection

The two-story clapboard house at 508 East Sharp Avenue, one block north of Gonzaga University and St. Aloysius Church. Mark Scrimger Collection

Gonzagas main buildings, with the steeples of St. Aloysius to the right. King Crosby Collection, Foley Center, Gonzaga University

Bing, circled, was the youngest in his high school class and looked it. Bing Crosby Collection, Foley Center, Conzaga University

With Kate’s encouragement, Bing won seven swimming medals, including first place in diving and second place in the speed events. He excelled at baseball, first at third base, then center field, and fantasized about playing professionally. Mark Scrimger Collection

At a gathering in the Gonzaga University gym in 1919, Bing can be seen near the bottom, over the word Bazaar.Bing Crosby Collection, Foley Center, Gonzaga University

Bing learned to swim the hard way, among discarded logs at McGoldrick’s lumber mill on the northern bank of the Spokane River. Mark Scrimger Collection

Mike Pecarovitch (center) was student council president and frequently shared the stage with Bing (right); by the 1990s Gonzaga students could stroll through Pecarovitch Field and study at Crosby Library. Bing Crosby Collection, Foley Center, Gonzaga University

Top: Frank Corkery, Bing’s boy hood friend and fellow glee club member, later became president of Gonzaga University. Bing Crosby Collection, Foley Center, Gonzaga University

Bottom: The Musicaladers posed in a publicity shot for their best and longest engagement, at Lareida s Dance Pavilion (below), originally an auto showroom. Left to right in striped blazers: Bob Pritchard, Clare Pritchard, Bing; in dark suits, Al Rinker, Miles Rinker. Mark Scrimger Collection

The speakeasy, which Bing remembered as The Swede’s, was a converted private house set back from the road and surrounded by a fence. When the lookout saw Mildred, he let them into a large, crowded room with tables and bar and a small platform for the piano and singer. The place, frequented by movie people, offered working girls as well as booze and song. When the spirit moved her, the proprietress would sing a number or two. Red Norvo, who knew Jane Jones after Prohibition, when he was married to Mildred and living in New York, described her as a large woman with a brassy style. Customers preferred what he called “cooing types,” like Mildred or Tommy Lyman, a peripatetic singer-pianist who played chic clubs in New York and Europe and liked to stop by Jane’s when he passed through town. ¹³ But it was Millie who grabbed the audience with her repertoire of melodramatic warhorses such as “Ships That Never Came In.” Large tips — her only salary — always flowed like wine.

In the years to come, Millie would recall Bing’s really gauging the spirit of the room that night and many that followed, shouting, “Sing it again!” or “Give the lady a twenty!” ¹⁴ When customers requested favorites, she dragged a bar stool over to where they sat. Bing was amazed when actor Eugene Pallette put a “Benjy” on her for two choruses of “Oh Daddy.” ¹⁵ He liked to tell the story of the evening when he and Al listened to Millie until closing. When the three arrived home, they slumped in the living room and talked until she announced that she was going to bed. Then, rising to her feet, she reached under her dress and pulled down her bloomers. A shower of twenty-dollar bills, dozens, hit the floor, covering her small feet.

On his first evening in Hollywood, however, Bing may have been too smashed to notice anything. Benny Stafford kept buying rounds, and Bing downed them all. By the time the foursome left, at two, Bing had rubber legs. During the next few years, he would develop a reputation as a lush, but when genuine stardom beckoned, his talent for nursing one drink or forgoing a cocktail at all convinced many that he was never a true alcoholic. “There has been a lot of talk about Bing being a heavy drinker when he was young,” Al observed. “Every once in a while when I worked with him he would go on a little binge, but he was not a steady drinker.” ¹⁶

The next evening Bing and Al drove to the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel to see their former colleague from the Musicaladers, Jimmy Heaton, who was playing trumpet in Ray West’s orchestra. Jimmy was delighted to see them, and as the next day, Monday, was musicians’ night off, he suggested an outing. Jimmy drove his friends down to San Diego, where they stopped to visit his cousins (the Carr brothers, who had a band), then continued across the border to Tijuana, where Al and Bing were shocked by the aggressive whores who tried unsuccessfully to lure them into their shacks. On the way back they stopped at Ryan Airfield near San Diego, where Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis was assembled a year later. For three dollars, Bing and Al took a ride in the rear open cockpit of a plane, circling over the ocean. With the wind blowing in their faces, they were scared to death and held on with white-knuckled grips. Al recalled, “When we landed we couldn’t get out of that old Jenny fast enough.” ¹⁷ For Bing, the flight had long-lasting repercussions. He would avoid planes whenever possible for most of his life, preferring train travel or ocean liners. He was uneasy about heights, and in hotels reserved rooms on the lower floors.

Bing and Al continued to live with Millie for a week or so, and she took them under her wing, making calls on their behalf and introducing them to her show-business friends. Mildred Bailey would one day be recognized as one of the first of the great women jazz singers, the key transitional figure between Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith and band singers like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Her small, light voice inclined to a whirring vibrato when she sang high notes, and her time and enunciation were exemplary. She was bedeviled, however, by a fierce temper, enormous pride, and a lonely soul that she attempted to soothe with food and compulsive cooking. She did not smoke or drink. Al thought she used the great dishes she prepared and her pets — a fleet of dachshunds — as a substitute for children. As sentimental as she was high-strung, she was an easy touch and a formidable enemy. Like many musicians, trombonist Milt Bernhart assumed that she was black when he heard her on the classic records she made with Teddy Wilson. ¹⁸ When he mentioned that to Red Norvo long after her death, Red chuckled and told him a story that he thought summed her up.

In the 1930s, after Mildred became a star on radio and a headliner with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, a rival singer began spreading rumors that she was black, and a Hearst columnist picked up the story. Whiteman didn’t care in the least — he’d have hired black musicians if his management hadn’t talked him out of it. But Mildred was incensed. By this time, she and Red were married and traveling together as members of Whiteman’s band. One day she asked Paul if he was still friendly with William Randolph Hearst, whom the bandleader had known during his salad days in San Francisco. Paul said he was. Hearing this, she demanded that Whiteman phone Hearst and have the columnist fired. Whiteman complied, as did Hearst. A couple of years later, as Millie and Red emerged from a theater, a man in a threadbare overcoat walked over and asked, “Miss Bailey?” The former columnist apologized for what he had written, conceding that he deserved to lose his job, and turned to go. Mildred, convulsed with tears, asked his name and how she could reach him, then went to Whiteman and got him rehired.

She had always been fond of Bing, and despite a misunderstanding or two, they would remain loyal to each other, the one invariably naming the other as his or her favorite singer. Bing credited Millie with the start of his career and reciprocated in full, engineering the Whiteman job that took her to the big time. In 1951 he assumed all her medical costs when she became fatally ill. Indeed, Millie got along better with the easygoing Bing, who liked a good time and shared her advanced and expansive musical tastes, than with her brother, who thought her “a little too barrelhouse.” ¹⁹ Al, who forgot that Bing had heard Mildred in Spokane, was at once proud and a little miffed about the bond between the two. “I guess he hadn’t expected to find that I had a sister with so much humor and who was so hip,” he wrote. To Bing, she was “tnucho mujer} a genuine artist, with a heart as big as the Yankee Stadium, and a gal who really loved to laugh it up.” ²⁰ He admired her jazzy slang (a dull town was “tiredsville”), which was new to him. Clearly, the role she played in launching their careers was not limited to providing introductions and arranging auditions.

Bing understood Millie’s rare abilities as a singer, her unaffectedness, understatement, and versatility. And she saw in him. the real thing, an antidote to the prissy aesthetes who had no swing or feeling for the blues. Bing, having won prizes in elocution, admired her impeccable diction; she encouraged his innate affinity for focusing on the language of a song, its meaning, the special story it told. She played records for him and Al, including Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and her pal Tommy Lyman, whose “Montmartre Rose” — the maudlin account of a Parisian courtesan with “a true heart of gold” — she played constantly ²¹ She listened to it so often that more than half a century later, Al could recite the lyric:

And each tear is a token

Of some heart that’s broken

In your garden, my Montmartre Rose. ²²

More significantly, it appears to have been Millie who first told Bing of a young man in Chicago whom he had to hear if he was going to be a serious singer: Louis Armstrong. What makes this advice particularly fascinating is that as of November 1925, Armstrong had yet to record as a vocalist (beyond a scat break at the end of a Fletcher Henderson side) and Mildred had yet to travel to Chicago or New York to hear him. She was familiar with Louis’s trumpet playing from his records with Henderson and Bessie Smith and may have advised Bing to study his instrumental work, which had musicians nationwide buzzing. Millie told Norvo that she advised Bing of Armstrong’s genius for inventing melody; possibly she was referring to his powers as a trumpeter. But Norvo thought she was speaking of his singing. Armstrong often sang at jam sessions, so the advance word in the jazz grapevine may have been enough to inspire Mildred’s praise. Barry Ulanov said of his old friend, “Mildred was two things: very hip and very much a gossip…. She’d pick up on anything and if anyone would have known about Louis she would have known.” ²³ Whatever the circumstances, Bing soon put Louis on a pedestal; their association would prove momentous musically, professionally, and — in advancing integration in show business — societally

During Bing and Al’s first few days in California, nothing came of Mildred’s efforts on behalf of her lodgers. Bing hooked up with his brother Everett, who was selling trucks as a front for moving liquor. Ev also wanted to help the boys. What happened next is unclear. According to Bing, Mildred arranged an audition with Mike Lyman, the brother of bandleader Abe Lyman and the proprietor of the Tent Cafe. ²⁴ Bing rented a tux and borrowed the accessories from Everett. Early accounts suggest that they did not get the job, although Bing would later claim that they worked the Tent Cafe as long as three weeks. Al would deny that he and Bing ever played the Tent Cafe; but he also disputed another audition of which there is no doubt. This one was arranged by Ev at the Cafe Lafayette. Harry Owens, who would play an important role in Bing’s career (as the composer of “Sweet Leilani”), led the band at the Lafayette, and Ev was a frequent customer. Having fared poorly with a “big, brassy and rhythmic” orchestra, Owens fired his expensive star soloists and switched to “the sweet ‘corn’ of ballads and violins.” ²⁵ Success followed, and Everett pressed Owens to audition the boys. Owens tried to dissuade Ev from encouraging his kid brother in a career as unstable as show business, but Ev insisted that the kid had his mind set.

Owens agreed to the tryout, and Bing and Al showed up in time to sit through an hourlong rehearsal. Then they took the stand, Al at the piano, Bing with a small cymbal in his hand. Before they completed their first number, the orchestra musicians, who had been filing out for their break, stopped and came back to applaud the finish. “Bing had a terrific beat,” Owens recalled, “but the voice was the thing.” ²⁶ He scheduled them for the show on the following Tuesday; their opening went over well, but afterward Owens told them that he lacked the budget to offer a regular job. By his own subsequent reckoning, Owens “missed the boat” and allowed the duo to sail away into Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. Yet he recalled the young Bing with affection: “What a sweet guy he was and so sincerely grateful.” ²⁷ In the last days of 1925, Bing told a reporter that he and Al got their start in Los Angeles at the Lafayette.

Their real start, however, came when Mildred heard about open auditions for Fanchon and Marco, a sister-and-brother team famous in vaudeville as dancers, now producing traveling vaudeville units for Loew’s California circuit. Mildred drove the boys to the audition at the Boulevard Theater and ordered them to relax: “You’re good and I know they’ll like you.” ²⁸ Fanchon, Marco, and their brother, Rube Wolf, sat quietly in the orchestra seats, watching the young performers. When their turn came, Bing and Al did a few rhythm songs (“China Boy” “San,” and “Copenhagen”), to which Bing added some business on kazoo, and two comical numbers (“Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home” and “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue”). They were hired at seventy-five dollars each per week for a thirteen-week tour in the new revue, The Syncopation Idea. Rehearsals began immediately at the Boulevard. They found themselves on a bill with jugglers, a dog act, a dance team, and a sixteen-girl high-kicking chorus line. The show opened on December 7, a month to the day since their arrival in Los Angeles.

Like most new acts that clicked from the first, Bing and Al evoked proven vaudeville traditions while pushing the boundaries. Not the least of their assets was the same sort of youthful jazz-inflected exuberance and worry-free winsomeness that characterized their loose harmonizations. They were a handsome team, Al with his wavy black hair and dark eyes and Bing with his lighter color and piercing baby blues. Their easy manner and horseplay disarmed audiences dazzled by the charge of their rhythm numbers and the beauty of Bing’s sonorous baritone on ballads. They presented themselves as cutups no less than singers and enjoyed themselves tremendously onstage. Vaudeville was hard, but fun. Bing saved the shirt he wore during the run of the revue. It had a false front and buttoned in the back for speedier changing.

Bing may have been a jazz hound, but he had learned the value of sentiment, not only from the great tenors of his youth but from a famous vaudeville team whose popularity was as fleeting as theatrical memory. In 1976 Bing remarked, “The ballads I sang a lot like Joe Schenck of Van and Schenck. I imitated him. I imitated McCormack, Jolson. I took a lot from Jolson…. We sang a lot of scat. What Ella Fitzgerald does now, only she does it about three hundred times better, and I think Cleo Laine does a lot of it, Mel Tormé. That’s what we were doing. We would sing a chorus straight and sing scat the next chorus and then go back to the lyric for the climax or something. And we’d sing a lot of comedy songs too. We lifted a lot of comedy from Van and Schenck and all the other acts that played Spokane at the Pantages Theater.” ²⁹ The report in Variety on Whiteman’s 1926 signing of Bing and Al describes them as “youths who have been doing a Van and Schenck type of act in picture houses.” ³⁰

Gus Van and Joe Schenck were the best-known tenor-baritone team in vaudeville, having starred for several seasons in the ZiegfeldFollies. They achieved particular success in a minstrel sequence singing Berlins “Mandy” (revived by Crosby in the 1954 White Christmas). Van was a dark, rumpled man who (Brooklyn-born, like his partner) favored southern speech affectations but used his deep baritone to master other dialects as well; Variety reported that he could do “Hebe, Irish, Cockney, Wop, Dutch, and Coon.” ³¹ He also harmonized with and anchored Schenck’s tenor. With his pale eyes, round face, and sweet voice, Schenck brought an Irish lilt to the day’s sentimental songs. Like Rinker, he worked from the piano. Like Crosby and Rinker, Van and Schenck imparted the contagious rapport of old pals from the same neighborhood.

In their filmed appearances, performing songs like “Nobody But Me” and “He’s That Kind of Pal,” Van and Schenck exhibit surprisingly similar harmonies to those of Rinker and Crosby. And yet Bing’s fascination with solo tenors like Schenck or Skin Young (White-man’s high-pitched singer-violinist) can hardly be detected in even his earliest recordings. One thing Bing and Al did not learn from Van and Schenck was scat. Nor is it likely they did much of it before the spring 1926 release of Louis Armstrong’s startling “Heebie Jeebies” — the first widely noted instance on records of an old New Orleans vocal style, which substitutes nonsense syllables for words.

By that time, Crosby and Rinker had made the papers. On New Year’s Day 1926 the Spokane Daily Chronicle headlined the first in a series of bulletins, LOS ANGELES CAPTURED BY SPOKANE PAIR; RINKER, CROSBY MAKE THEATRICAL HIT. ³² The story told of the bumpy trip two months earlier, the discarding of the “delapidated flivver,” the audition for Fanchon and Marco, the success of their singing and “humorous comedy sketch,” and a purported contract (never realized) that promised to launch them on the big-time Orpheum circuit. The article closed with references to the Crosby and Rinker families and to Roy R. Boomer of the Clemmer Theater, who had brought the pair to “the attention of the theater-going public.” After a month in Los Angeles at the Boulevard and Loew’s State, the Fanchon and Marco unit went on tour, opening in the nearby suburb of Glendale and then making brief stops on a western route that took in Pasadena, Pomona, and Riverside. This was followed by full weeks at theaters along a triangular route that went south to San Diego, north to Long Beach, and west to Santa Ana and finally San Bernardino, where they played three days before returning to Los Angeles for another week at the Boulevard.

They were no longer alone, on- or offstage. A week after Bing and Al auditioned, Fanchon and Marco held another audition at Loews State, where they paired two attractive female dancers, Bobby Thompson and Doreen Wilde, who arrived separately but knew each other from previous shows. Doreen was a few years younger than Bing but was far better traveled. As a young girl in El Monte, a small town east of Los Angeles, she studied ballet with Ernest Belcher (father of dancers Lina Basquette and Marge Champion) and Spanish dancing with Eduardo Cansino (father of Rita Hayworth), among others. She was appearing in specialty acts in high-priced nightclubs by the age of seventeen. She toured with the Duncan Sisters, Ken Murray, and Jimmy Durante (“quite young, very ugly, played a wicked piano”), worked from Hawaii to New York, and received a hundred-dollar tip from Al Capone and free tap lessons from Bill Robinson. (“He taught me everything I ever knew about tap,” Doreen recalled.) She was dismayed to find that her mentor could not enter a restaurant in her company. Yet thanks to Robinson and another black dance legend, Peg Leg Johnson, with whom she toured, Doreen developed a style that combined tap, ballet, and contortionist body twisting featured in her eye-opening publicity photos. Doreen had almond eyes, a wide mouth, and black hair bobbed in the manner of Louise Brooks. ³³

Fanchon recognized in her a spry youthfulness comparable to that of Crosby and Rinker, and he sought a partner for her. By happy coincidence, he chose Bobby Thompson, whom Doreen had met touring in the first mainland production to play Hawaii. Bobby was a few years older; she could sing as well as dance; and she was blond and beautiful — the perfect complement to Doreen. Fanchon asked them to work up a number with a couple of boys who were just getting started but were “really good.” ³⁴

“She brought two boys out,” Doreen recalled. “Al Rinker was tall and thin with curly black hair and played a piano like youVe never heard before. Bing was a character. He was sort of short and stubby and he had a special way of singing. They were very cute. We liked them right away and they liked us.” ³⁵ During rehearsals they devised a routine in which Doreen danced as Bing sang “Mary Lou,” a brand- new song by an unlikely coalition of bandleader Abe Lyman, pianist J. Russel Robinson (formerly of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band), and filmmaker George Waggner (best remembered as director of The Wolf Man). Bing’s performance of the song went over so well, however, that they cut the dance. “Mary Lou” was a constant in the boys’ act that year. It was arguably the first of Bing’s signature songs, though he did not record it until 1976, when he celebrated his demi-centennial at London’s Palladium. On that occasion, he said, “Fifty years ago I stepped on the stage of a little neighborhood theater in West Los Angeles [always pronounced by Bing with a hard g]. And my big ballad that afternoon was a plaintive little plea….” ³⁶

In the course of doing a grueling four shows a day, five on weekends, Bing, Al, Doreen, and Bobby grew close. At first the relationships were platonic, “just like brothers and sisters.” They boarded in the same hotels and on one occasion got bounced during a Shriners’ convention when the foursome was caught sleeping in the same bed (“the only place we could get,” Doreen would recall). Soon they came up with a quartet number — one that stayed in the show: “Before the ensemble came out for the finale, why Bing and Al and I came out and Bobby and I did the Charleston and they banged up the piano and Bing hum-drummed. He loved to do that — just snap his fingers and tap his feet. He was a doll.” One incident that gave them something to laugh about concerned Doreen’s specialty dress, which had long sleeves with underarm slits, “so you could do your walkovers and lift up your arms.” ³⁷ While visiting her dressing room during a show, Doreen’s mother noticed the slits and helpfully sewed them up. After making a costume change and walking onstage, Doreen realized that she could not do her number and backed off.

By now Bing was beginning to enjoy the showbiz life a little too eagerly: the high-kickers in the chorus line, the contraband booze, the gambling joints on both sides of the border. He could hardly believe his luck, singing for good money without a worry in the world. Away from the Jesuits and his mother for the first time in his life, he inhaled as much life as his lungs could handle. “For in that youth of mine,” confessed Augustine, apparently in a similar mood, “I was on fire to take my fill of hell.” ³⁸ Bing was a long way from home, and he wanted to keep it that way. On their evening off, when the troupe arrived at the Hotel Santa Ana, Bing wrote a chatty letter to a friend in Spokane, Dirk Crabbe, using Mildred’s home as the return address.

Sunday

Dear Dirk—;

How’s everything and have you watered any showcases ^* of late? Received a letter from Walter the other day and he tells me that you and the little Anderson girl are quite thick. I expect you will be pulling off that marrying business before long. Good groceries at their hut anyhow so you’re not so dumb at that.

We came in here from Long Beach yesterday and this is a pretty little town of about 75,000 souls. Long Beach is the niftiest town I was ever in. Swell golf courses, good bathing and beauteous gals. I was indeed sorry to leave. We play San Bernardino and then go into L.A. for a week before going to Frisco, Oakland etc which territory will consume about 10 weeks.

Received a copy of the Chronicle containing a clipping relating to our work. I expect a number of the cornfeds up there thought it was applesauce, but it is all quite true. We have been very fortunate and are situated now in an envious position which should make us some real dough. At any rate I am sufficiently satisfied with this locality to stay here as long as I’m getting groceries and a flop and if I ever return to Spokane it will be merely for a visit. People up there have no conception of the opportunities presented down here, both commercial and recreational. Long Beach has only 100,000 people but it makes Spokane look like Tekoa. Of course the larger towns are even more wonderful.

I have seen Hazlett Smith several times at the Ambassador. The next time I am in L.A. we’re going to get together and do things. He certainly plays classy looking twists.

While in San Diego I ran into Pete and Ed Smith (Kappa Sig from U.SC.) and of course we must go to Tia Juana and get stiff. Am enclosing a portrait taken in the Holy City. We had just come from the Foreign Club where I woti some dough. Hence the happy grin. While down there in San Diego we stayed with Jay at the Beach and we didn’t miss a thing.

Was quite surprised to learn that Wink and Alice are still clubby and that Betty and Ray Johnson are likewise afflicted. Understand that the Band might go to Frisco in which visit I shall probably see them there. I hope so.

There are certainly plenty of filthy bands around L.A. Tone don’t mean a thing. Rythm [sic] and heat are the only requisites together with novel arrangements. There are so dam [sic] many hot sax-men down here that it isn’t even peculiar. All the good men make plenty dough. Anywhere from 85 to 150 per week and the cafe jobs are a snap.

Well Dirk I fear this letter is getting a bit lengthy and tiresome so will cease. Drop me a line soon and give me all the dirt on the boys & girls. Say hello to the gang.

Your friend

Bing. ³⁹

The fledgling entertainer did not entirely leave the Jesuits behind with the cornfeds. “He was always drunk,” Doreen said. “After every show at night he just got himself plastered, yet he would never miss mass. I don’t know how he even made the shows, but he was up to go to church every Sunday morning. It was a riot.” As ever, he was loquacious: “When Bing talked he used words that made you feel like an idiot. Even an intelligent person would feel like an idiot because he used words that were not in the dictionary, but they sounded good.” Most of all he was funny — “funny to talk to, funny when he ate.” ⁴⁰

For a brief spell, Bing and Doreen were romantically involved, but Bobby was the one he fell for, the first in a line of sweet-faced, sharp, showbiz troupers with whom he was smitten. To Al, who took up with a brunette in the chorus line (“16 Lightning Flashes — Fanchon’s Own Steppers”), Bing’s romances were casual and all too typical of show-business relationships. But according to Doreen, who met her own true love on the vaudeville circuit, Bing and Bobby (“the most fantastic couple”) were quite serious. “Very much in love. They really were,” she said. “They were going to get married in Tia Juana, but her mother said she wasn’t going to let her get tied up with a poor singer, so they separated.” ⁴¹

On returning to Los Angeles in early February, Bing and Al bought a secondhand Dodge to continue the tour and squire their girls. The second lap of The Syncopation Idea brought them to San Francisco with stopovers in Oakland and Sacramento. The stay in the Bay Area precipitated Bing’s long friendship with the Hearst family. A young stage-door Johnny named Bill called on Doreen at Loew’s Warfield, where they played a highly successful week in a show that also featured the new Garbo film (The Torrent), comedy shorts, and selections from Carmen. Doreen demurred, complaining that she was too tired to go out after five shows a day, and suggested he call on her during the revue’s next tour of San Francisco. She was unaware that Bill, a Berkeley student, was William Randolph Hearst’s son and a Crosby-Rinker fan.

Of his first encounter with Bing, William Hearst Jr. said, “He was very gentle and unprepossessing — not pushy at all. You’d never know he was a show person — always smiling and grinning and very easy to get along with.” ⁴² Bill invited Bing and Al to a party at his father’s San Simeon estate. The boys asked Doreen, Bobby, and another dancer to go with them. They were put up in cottages for three days, visiting the main house only at dinner (some twenty-five guests were catered to). They saw Marion Davies once, during an early-morning swim. She waved.

All this a mere thirteen weeks after they pulled out of Spokane.

Upon finishing in Sacramento and returning to Los Angeles, Bing and Al learned they would not be required for the next Fanchon and Marco tour, unlike Bobby and Doreen, who went directly into rehearsal. They found themselves, to use the show-business euphemism, at liberty. Having saved some money, they took an apartment in the San Fernando Valley and scoured the trade papers for work. They were now experienced vaudevillians and didn’t need Mildred or anyone else to tell them how to find gigs. A few weeks later they learned that Will Morrissey’s Music Hall Revue was casting at the Majestic Theater; they auditioned and were hired at the same price as before, seventy-five dollars each. Morrissey’s shows were coproduced by Arthur Freed, an erstwhile vaudeville performer who, as a producer in the 1940s and 1950s, would redefine the movie musical at MGM. In 1926 he was already a successful songwriter with access to financial backing.

According to Bing, the producers rechristened the Majestic the Orange Grove Theater for the duration of the show, “thinking that tag would give it more verve.” ⁴³ The company rehearsed for weeks, but the ill-fated presentation was forced to open a day late, on April 30; the costumes had not arrived on time. ⁴⁴

Bing and Al were not initially featured. Freed remembered, “We loved Bing, but didn’t know what to do with him because the show was already running. So we put him in the pit to sing between acts and he went over so big that we had trouble raising the curtain for the second act!” ⁴⁵ In truth, Bing and Al worked on an elevated stand in the pit for four months until the revue hit San Diego. The show’s chief attractions were Midge Miller, Morrissey’s wife; Eddie Borden, a sketch comedian who parodied Aimee Semple McPherson and others; singer Lee Kent; comedian Eddie Lambert; an adagio team; and a chorus line. Those were the acts expected to entice customers. Bing and Al were gravy. Yet night after night, the audiences — rich with important Hollywood movers and shakers — responded mostly to Two Boys and a Piano, demanding encores that stopped the show.

Bing began to meet some of the brightest talents of the day. During the first month of Morrissey’s revue, the English musical Chariot’s Revue opened at Hollywood’s El Capitan Theater, fresh from a triumphant run in New York. It introduced America to three established stars of the British stage: Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, and Jack Buchanan. Morrissey, who was friendly with producer André Chariot, arranged for Bing and Al to see a Wednesday matinee; they were bowled over by the show’s sophistication, fast pace, and love of language revealed in extended comic skits. One night after the curtain fell, Morrissey invited them to accompany him to a party Chariot was giving for his headliners. They drove to a house in the Hollywood Hills and, in Al’s words, “tried to play it cool,” sipping Mumm Extra Dry champagne and meeting the stars. ⁴⁶ Late that evening Chariot’s pianist sat down at the Steinway, and Lillie cracked everyone up with her double entendres and mock scowls in material such as “Susannah’s Squeaking Shoes,” followed by Lawrence with a signature number (“I Don’t Know”) and a Noël Coward ballad. Buchanan did a medley from the show. Morrissey, by this time feeling no pain, rose and asked if everyone would like to hear a few songs by the young men in his show. “We were full of champagne and ready,” Al recalled. ⁴⁷ He went to the piano as Bing pulled out his pocket cymbal, and they dashed through “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’Along.” Asked for a second number, Al suggested the Tommy Lyman number Mildred always played, “Montmartre Rose.” Bing agreed and ladled his best syrup on the plight of that sorrowful fille de joie, his high notes receiving full attention and much applause, notably from the three English stars, who rushed to him with compliments. It was a heady moment: the beginning of his ascendancy as Hollywood’s own crooner. Lillie and Buchanan later worked with him, but Bing never recorded “Montmartre Rose.”

At another party, Bing met a young musician who, after fitful encounters over a period of more than twenty years, became one of his closest friends, Phil Harris. “I was working a place called Edgewater Beach Club, one of the first of the beach clubs, with Henry Halstead, who had a pretty big band on the coast,” Harris recalled. “Bing came in for just one night with a private party and we kind of hit it off because I was playing drums then and he played that cymbal. He was doing comedy songs, something like — I used to kid him about it later — ‘Aphrodite, where’d you leave your nightie last night’ or something. We hit it off pretty good.” ⁴⁸ He went to see Crosby and Rinker in Morrissey’s show, which he characterized as an “Olsen and Johnson kind of thing,” referring to the vaudeville team known for shameless hokum and lunatic jokes. ⁴⁹ Phil was most impressed by Bing’s timing: “He was singing those rhythm tunes pretty good — I don’t remember him doing any ballads. Those things were rolling.” ⁵⁰

But Morrissey was having trouble making ends meet. At one performance he informed the audience that the show could not continue because Freed had reneged on payments. In the audience was the agent and future producer Edward Small, who offered to underwrite the cost of completing the performance. Morrissey had other troubles, however, including drinking heavily and bouncing the cast’s checks. Everyone was relieved when the show went on tour. But before the company pulled out of Los Angeles, Morrissey arranged for himself and several members of his cast to appear at an extravagant benefit for the American Legion at the Olympic Auditorium. Bing and Al found themselves on a once-in-a-lifetime bill of some thirty acts, among them Eddie Cantor, Tom Mix, Fanny Brice, Pola Negri, Jackie Coogan, and one of Bing’s perennial idols, Charlie Chaplin.

One admirer who phoned their apartment was Jack Partington, a producer of stage shows for two key theaters in the Paramount-Publix chain: the new Metropolitan in Los Angeles and the Granada in San Francisco. Bing was out on the golf course, so Al went alone to see Partington, an amicable man who got right down to business. He liked the act and wanted to sign them for his two theaters. Al initially tried to act casual, but when Partington offered them $300 a week, twice what they were earning with Morrissey, he quickly accepted. Bing could hardly believe it when he heard the news that evening. The next morning they drove to Partington’s office and signed a two-month contract that was to take effect after they fulfilled their commitment to Morrissey.

When the Morrissey revue opened in San Diego, the duo was finally raised from the pit to a platform that extended beyond the stage. The local paper raved about their up-to-date selection of “red-hot mama songs” and credited them with “stealing the show from those billed as stars.” It described Bing and Al as “two young men whom the audience… wanted to take home and use for permanent amusement.” ⁵¹ Some women who could not take them home made themselves available backstage, but these admirers were not numerous enough to keep the show in the black, and after the company made the jump from four days in San Diego to a full month in San Francisco, empty seats indicated greater trouble ahead.

The situation got worse after Bing took the opportunity to resume his friendship with Bill Hearst, who insisted on taking the entire cast, not least the chorus girls, to the campus at Berkeley. Hearst’s frat brothers provided a washtub filled with pure gin, an ice block, and a decorative orange that was supposed to camouflage the liquid as punch. Plastered along with the rest of the performers, Bing pulled a Bea Lillie, singing his repertoire of risqué songs, including “Where’d Ya Stay Last Night,” the Aphrodite/nightie number that had so amused Phil Harris. “Our show bordered on the — shall we say outré?” Bing later admitted, ⁵² but he denied that the Hearst party was the orgy implied by campus officials, who suspended a few students and prohibited the rest from attending Morrissey’s midnight shows, thus hastening its demise. Bing felt guilty about the blow to Morrissey, perhaps more than he would have had he not signed the impending deal with Partington. But Berkeley’s entire student body could not have saved the show. After the midnight performance on September 11, the company packed it in. ⁵³

* * *

Partington revised the team’s contract to encompass a two-month obligation, between September 18 and November 19, beginning and ending in San Francisco. Bing and Al had a week to kill before the commitment began, and when they read in the paper that Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, on whose records they had teethed, were arriving by rail to play a month at Grauman’s Million Dollar Theater, they decided to join the welcoming throng. The band, recently returned from Europe, was at the peak of its popularity. Al recalled that as they approached the station early in the morning, he and Bing “were more than excited.” ⁵⁴ They watched in awe as such celebrated musicians as trumpeter Henry Busse and tiny banjoist Mike Pingitore stepped onto the platform, followed by the great man himself —oversize in everything but his razor-thin mustache. “We stood watching until they all got off,” Al wrote, “then drove away knowing that we had seen the most famous band in the world, in the flesh.”

Whiteman opened the next day, September 16, and Bing and Al were there when the curtain rose, revealing some thirty musicians in blue-and-gray uniforms. The maestro bowed and lifted the baton, and, in Al’s words, “the sound was like nothing we ever heard,” big, full, and beautiful, with a complement of violins to soften the brasses and saxophones. ⁵⁵ Busse played his puckish trademark, “Hot Lips,” Pingitore his bracingly strummed “Linger Awhile,” and Wilbur Hall his fleet “Nola” on trombone and “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on bicycle pump. A vocal trio drawn from the band, made up of trombonist Jack Fulton, guitarist Austin (Skin) Young, and violinist Charles Gaylord, rendered sweet, high-pitched harmonies. Fulton, in his effeminate, almost flaccid style, sang a new song, “In a Little Spanish Town,” through a megaphone. Bing liked the number and quickly added it to his repertoire, but the singer who caught his attention was Skin Young, whose “sensational” style and “tremendous range” was, he recalled, reason enough to attend the show a second time. Bing claimed, “He could not only sing things like The Road to Mandalay, he could sing blues songs and fast rhythm songs and he could make sounds as uninhibited as a pre-Cab Calloway.” ⁵⁶ Bing’s high praise is not supported by Young’s pallid recordings, but his description uncannily portends the Crosby emerging that year.

Two days later Bing and Al were back in San Francisco, featured players in Partington’s Purple and Gold Revue, which within a week was revised and renamed Bits of Broadway. Paramount-Publix billed them as “Crosby and Rinker — Two Boys and a Piano — Singing Songs Their Own Way.” They delighted audiences and reviewers, one of whom singled out Bing’s customary “Mary Lou.” Shortly before the company was set to return to the Metropolitan in Los Angeles, Variety ran a review by its San Francisco-based reporter, Robert J. Landry (later the trade’s managing editor). The boys’ first major notice appeared under the heading NEW ACTS and ignored the rest of the revue.

Crosby and Rinker

Songs

Granada, San Francisco

Two boys from Spokane and not new to show business, but new to picture house work. They appeared with Will Morrissey s Music Hall Revue, and were a success in a show that was a flop. Bringing their methods to the Granada, they registered solidly and on the crowded Sunday performances practically stopped the show.

The duo works with a piano and minus orchestral accompaniment. Blues of the feverish variety are their specialty. They are well equipped with material, presumably their own. Young and clean cut, the boys found a quick welcome. When they have completed their weeks locally, they will unquestionably find a market for their wares in other presentation houses.

Wherever the public goes for “hot” numbers served hot, Crosby and Rinker ought to have an easy time. ⁵⁷

In Los Angeles, a tougher town, Bits of Broadway expanded to include a fourteen-piece pit orchestra, additional acts, and the banjo-playing emcee, Eddie Peabody, who was entrusted with much of the responsibility for keeping the show running on time (a necessity as the four and five daily performances were programmed around an unwavering movie schedule). For their spot, Crosby and Rinker commenced with the surefire “Five Foot Two” and then debuted their version of the new song appropriated from Whiteman, “In a Little Spanish Town.” The stage was dimmed except for small blue spots trained on each of them. Microphones were not yet in use, but as Al recounted, the team had the complete attention of a capacity audience of 2,500 when they did the tune. It instantly became one of their biggest successes, a signature song like “Mary Lou,” and the first in the long string of modern standards associated with Bing — if only during his season in vaudeville.

Composed by young Mabel Wayne, “In a Little Spanish Town” is a Latin-tinged waltz built on alternating dotted-eighth and sixteenth notes with two-measure lulls at the end of each phrase. It gave play to Bing’s rhythmic pluck and provided Al with plenty of room for piano fills. The lyrics came from the team of Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, whose hits included “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” and other Jolson benchmarks as well as the duo’s standby, “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue.” For some reason (perhaps in deference to Whiteman or because he wearied of it), Bing did not record “In a Little Spanish Town” until 1955, when he cut a jazzy piano-trio version for a radio broadcast and released it on an album.

To dress up their rhythm songs, Bing and Al began to interpolate unison scat breaks in imitation of two trumpets. King Oliver and Louis Armstrong had made this kind of thing famous in jazz circles, but it was certainly novel and possibly unprecedented in vaudeville. Suddenly, Bing and Al found themselves routinely stopping the show. This is not showbiz hyperbole; they stopped the proceedings flat as the audience howled for more. The emcee, Eddie Peabody, whom Al thought was jealous but who may simply have been trying to keep the show on schedule, did everything he could think of to throttle the audience, but to no avail. Time had to be allotted for two or more encores. For Bing and Al’s second week at the Metropolitan, the show was revised as Russian Revels. Most of the revelers who bought tickets were drawn by the coolly irreverent cutups from Spokane. Those two offered something fresh and modern, and they put over their art with energy and humor and without airs.

Red Norvo, a vaudevillian of eighteen, was laid up with typhoid fever in a small hotel not far from the Metropolitan when Bing and Al did the Partington shows. “When I got strong enough,” he recalled, “I walked across the park over to a theater and I just felt like going in ‘cause I’d been sick so long. The thing that knocked me out was Rinker and Crosby. Just crazy. They pushed a piano out on stage, a little upright that Al played. Bing had a little cymbal hooked on the edge of the piano, you know, with the lid back? And they’d sing and they were scat singing even then. Their time was good and they did cute tunes. I would say it was jazz in those days, yeah. It was a sharp act.” ⁵⁸ They did scat exchanges on kazoos (“terrible sounding things,” Bing said); ⁵⁹ incorporating a trick picked up from Mound City Blue Blowers records, they played them into coffee tins. “It gave out a wah-wahing sound I thought jazzy,” Bing explained. ⁶⁰ During the third week at the Metropolitan, the show was reworked as Joy Week, and Crosby and Rinker were billed second to Peabody.

They were the Jazz Age personified, two clean-cut white boys bringing a variation on black music to the vaudeville stage with panache and charm. They represented something borderline radical: a trace of danger, a current from a generation that threatened to bust out of old and settled traditions. At no time between the Civil War and Prohibition had the nation’s young people clamored for a music of their own or rebelled against the songs of their parents. Partly because the jazziness of Two Boys and a Piano stopped a few stations north of the genuine article, the young men — Bing was twenty-three and Al two months short of nineteen — suggested youth and daring in a way that did not send the “cornfeds” running for cover. They charmed everyone yet were harbingers of a break with conventions, a fissure gradually developing in the American family. Bing, especially, signaled the change with his easy wit; cool, distant manner; and unmistakably virile baritone. When he sang a song, he created drama.

Al, who had idolized Bing for so long, knew his partner communicated more powerfully as a soloist than through his hotcha settings for two voices and encouraged his partner to do more ballads, more solos. Al’s arrangements were loosely harmonized, drawn from jumping instrumental numbers. The blend of his voice with Bing’s was edgy, not self-consciously adroit in the manner of the old barbershop quartets nor as rigorous and inventive as the Mills Brothers or Boswell Sisters, who followed on their heels. But their loose open-collared style worked in their favor. They improvised until a routine was nailed, then stuck with it, as every vaudeville team did. Yet Bing and Al were able to contrive the illusion of spontaneity; each audience felt that it was seeing something different from what others saw. When Bing sang alone, the attitude of the audience changed from jokey camaraderie to rapt empathy. Drawing on the soulfulness of Irish laments, Jewish theater, and African American blues, Bing could take a ballad to the cliff’s edge of sentimentality without going over. He was too honest, too respectful to be manipulative. The audience could trust him with its emotions.

Before their first week at the Metropolitan was up, Bing was handed a note backstage: Paul Whiteman wanted to see them. “We thought someone on the bill was kidding us,” Bing told columnist Ed Sullivan in 1939. The next morning Bing answered the phone at the apartment and was about to hang up when Jimmy Gillespie convinced him that he really was the manager of Whiteman’s band and that the invitation was definitely on the level. The great man was completing his run at the Million Dollar Theater in a couple of days and wanted to see Bing and Al in his dressing room tomorrow. “After the phone call, Bing and I just looked at each other,” Al remembered. “We still couldn’t believe it wasn’t a joke. When we talked it over with Mildred, she said, ‘It doesn’t sound like a joke to me. This may be the chance you’ve been waiting for.’We hardly slept that night.” ⁶¹