Bing Crosby (11 page)

For a boy characterized as lackadaisical, Bing had a peculiar affinity for early-morning jobs he could keep throughout the
school year. As delivery boy for the
Spokesman-Review,
he rose at four to collect the papers. His whistling and singing carried far in the quiet Spokane mornings as he pedaled
his bike from house to house. Occasionally a neighbor raised a window and warned him to keep it down. In 1938 he wrote Charles
Devlin of the paper’s promotional department, “I hope all my boys may start as carriers. I want them to be workers.”
³³
All his brothers had routes, he noted, and the girls filled in when the boys were sick. “Of the bunch, I probably developed
the least desire for labor… but the whistling experience came in mighty handy.”
³⁴

No amount of work could compromise Bing’s belief that he was by nature lazy. If indolence was part of the professional Crosby
charm, it figured privately as a source of penitence. As Seneca wrote and Bing learned to recite in Latin, “Nothing is so
certain as that the evils of idleness can be shaken off by hard work.” The habit of rising early came naturally to him. He
roused himself on cold winter mornings when it was dark and warmed his hands over an oil drum, waiting for the papers. After
delivering them, he had breakfast at home, served mass (if it was the third week of the month), and attended school. One of
Kate’s friends told Bing about an open position for morning janitor at the Everyman’s Club on Front Avenue, a flophouse for
transient miners and loggers in the heart of skid row. Bing applied for the job and was hired. For a buck a day that winter,
he layered himself in wool clothing and after delivering his papers took a streetcar across the river into downtown Spokane,
arriving at five. For the next hour, he tidied the facility, maneuvering around the drunks and layabouts, learning about canned
heat (which, liquefied into its alcoholic content, caused blindness and madness) and powdered tobacco and other comforts of
the lower depths. He was back home for breakfast by seven, except on days he had 6:30 mass.

Kate proudly described him as “prompt, methodical, sticks to his plans and sticks to his word.”
³⁵
She bristled at the notion, promulgated
chiefly by Bing himself, that he was idle. “My children were brought up to do for themselves and from the oldest to the youngest
they still do. Anyone who works with Bing, for instance, knows he rarely sends or asks for things. He just quietly goes and
gets it for himself.”
³⁶
Later, in Hollywood, he was known for his entourage of one, Gonzaga classmate Leo Lynn. A butler whom Bing hired in his most
baronial years — at the insistence of his second wife — mistakenly assumed Crosby didn’t like him, as he wasn’t permitted
to pack or carry his employer’s suitcase or open his car door or fuss over him at all.
³⁷

“He had a vocabulary like a senator’s,” Bing’s father once said, “and we used to call him Travis McGutney.”
³⁸
His way with words, not just his singing and whistling, helped define Bing’s personality for his friends. He rolled large
words on his tongue, trilled rs, fiddled with malapropisms and spoonerisms, and mimicked the lower, upper, and outcast classes,
exemplified in minstrel badinage or highfalutin rhetoric. This talent gave him distinction within his gang. Interviewed in
the 1940s, childhood friends and neighbors said they thought him more likely to become a comedian than a singer. One pal said
he hardly recognized the Bing he knew in the movies until he began making the
Road
pictures with Bob Hope. All that easy banter with Hope, the double takes and primed reactions, the fast wit and easy superiority
— that was the way he was in school. His romantic pictures of the 1930s, on the other hand, weren’t Bing at all, a friend
said; he had never showed that much interest in girls.

The only early crush he spoke of was inspired by one Gladys Lemmon, who survived in the Crosby mythology less for her curly-haired
charms than her pun-inspiring name. Upon hearing that Bing carried her books and took her sledding, Larry taunted him at the
dinner table as a lemon-squeezer, prompting Bing to hurl a slice of buttered bread that in later accounts metamorphosed into
a leg of lamb. The courtship allegedly ended when Bing was forced to wear a starched priestlike collar that made his neck
chafe to Gladys’s birthday party. It was not his only social faux pas. Margaret Nixon would not invite him to her birthdays
because he once stole the party ice cream from her back porch. He was that kind of boy, she said. And Vera Lemley complained
that after she broke a date with him, Bing would not talk to her for two years.

If his glib lingo failed to serve Bing as a gallant, it did enhance his standing at Gonzaga High. In his sophomore year he
was cited as Next in Merit in elocution (Frank Corkery, who put no less faith in language, won the gold medal) and took first
honors in English. Bing’s popularity and sportsmanship were affirmed early in the semester: he was elected class consultor
and captained the victorious Dreadnoughts in the Junior Yard Association Midget Football League. He also made the JYA baseball
team. Posing in his striped red-and-white uniform, he was small, chubby, beaming. Those endeavors proved less meaningful than
his admission to the Junior Debating Society, which increased his presence in public-speaking events, though he proved better
at elocution than debate. The university magazine,
Gonzaga,
reviewed a recital of Poe’s “The Bells” by Bing, Corkery, and two others as “striking and novel,” the high point of a contest
in public speaking.
³⁹
Bing recited “Romancin’” to a packed house at St. Aloysius Hall and took the adverse position in a debate about limiting
the American presidency to a single term of six years.

In 1919, through the efforts of Father Kennelly, football was restored as a major activity at Gonzaga. Its triumphant team
produced two players inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. One was Ray Flaherty (“big and powerful — watch out for
Flaherty,”
Gonzaga
prophesied), with whom Bing remained friendly all his life. Flaherty led the NFL in pass receptions in 1932, helped the New
York Giants to the NFL championship in 1934, and retired as coach with the highest winning percentage (.735) in the annals
of the Washington Redskins. Ray and Bing were on the Midget team together, and Ray admired his moxie, though he did not think
much of him as a footballer.
⁴⁰
Still, Bing’s fortitude was noted after he trimmed down to 135 pounds and learned to handle himself adequately as center.
Of a JYA game against Hillyard High (a tie: 19-19),
Gonzaga
reported, “B. Crosby was a tower of strength on defense.”
⁴¹

Flaherty conceded that Bing was “pretty good” at baseball. “We played on the Ideal Laundry team in the commercial or business
league. We’d play at Mission Park, five blocks up the street from Gonzaga. Oh, we were best of friends, used to chum around
all the time, wrestled, played handball, though he didn’t play too much handball. Bing was more into entertainment in the
evening. He was always a happy kid and was always singing a song. Even though he was a little
kid, he was singing. He just was full of music and he was a great whistler. He could really whistle. They used to have these
smokers where they’d have kids that liked to box and they’d get a pretty good student body and some outsiders. Bing used to
sing at those. He didn’t box, I don’t think, but he sang and that brought some people in, too. Hell, he could sing like nobody
else, sing and whistle. He had a hell of a whistle.”
⁴²

In addition to winning reelection as class consultor in his junior year, Bing was voted Junior Yard Association secretary-treasurer
following “a stormy session and a bit of political logrolling.”
⁴³
Bing racked up distinctions in English, history, elocution, theology, Latin, and civics and prevailed in reading competitions,
scoring coups with “The Dukite Snake” and Macauley’s poem of Horatius at the Bridge. “I took those eloquent lines in my teeth
and shook them as a terrier shakes a bone,” he wrote.
⁴⁴
Bing, Corkery, and Flaherty enlisted together as charter members of Gonzaga’s new glee club. In the club’s annual photograph,
Bing sports a high pompadour and a roomy jacket. For their first grand concert in St. Aloysius Hall, Bing did not participate
in musical numbers but read three selections during intermission.

He fared less well in debate; as part of a two-man team that lost two decisions, he argued against abolishing immigration
and forcing Woodrow Wilson’s resignation due to illness. Bing, who always took the liberal side, was demoted to an alternate
in his senior year. His role in the public debate that year (concerning the League of Nations) was to deliver a recitation
at intermission.
⁴⁵
He had reason to regard his education as Augustine did his own: “Their one aim was that I should learn how to make a good
speech and become an orator capable of swaying his audience,” the Bishop of Hippo wrote.
⁴⁶

Bing looked back with mocking amusement at the rival clubs organized by the most avid speakers and debaters. He founded the
Bolsheviks in loyal opposition to the Dirty Six, who commandeered perks such as patrolling varsity sporting events. The “rival
tongs,” as Bing called them, indulged in free-for-all political debate.
⁴⁷
Inevitably, a priest — Father O’Brien, a Brit — reproached Bing’s clique for embracing a name associated with godlessness.
“Apparently his devoutness and his English sense of humor had him confused, for he
said we’d be ‘cleansed’ if we stopped using the name,” Bing wrote.
⁴⁸
Bing also joined the Derby Club, an offshoot of the Bolsheviks, which consisted of six or eight “blades” who sported derbies
in class.

Recitation led to other theatrical projects. Gonzaga looked upon theater not merely as a high-school drama-club option but
as an undertaking essential to a model Jesuit education. Writing in the university yearbook, instructor William DePuis traced
“love of the dramatic” to a pagan worship of Bacchus, which the church adapted to its own ends: “The Mystery and Miracle play
taught the sacred story of Christ and the saints. The religious idea yielded gradually to the popular desire for amusement,
and the holy day became the holiday.”
⁴⁹
That notion would be employed as a motif in Bing’s Father O’Malley films.

Bing enjoyed two genuine theatrical triumphs in his senior year, yet the production that became fixed in Crosby lore was a
junior English class presentation of
Julius Caesar
— a prize example of hapless mythmaking. In the February 1919 performance, promoted in the
Spokane Daily Chronicle
with a photo and cast listing, Bing played Second Citizen. His friend Ed “Pinky” Gowanlock played Caesar. According to witnesses
interviewed three decades later, the most memorable moment followed Caesar’s death, as the rolled-up curtain sprang from its
hinges and nearly flattened Pinky. Over time, however, Bing became the center of everyone’s memories. According to Ted and
Larry, he played Marc Antony and dodged the curtain; according to Everett, he played Caesar and dodged the curtain. According
to Bing, in 1946, he played a fallen soldier who dodged the curtain and was rewarded with howls of laughter, for which he
took many bows. In 1976 he said that he played a fallen soldier who calmly walked off after the curtain fell. If one accepts
Pinky’s account, he might well have invoked Plautus’s lament
Ut saepe summa ingenia in occulto latent
(How often the greatest talents are shrouded in obscurity). Bing did remark in 1957, when he presented the school with a
new library, “In show business, we like to take our bows, even when we can steal them.”
⁵⁰

Forgotten entirely or at least unmentioned was the Antony Bing played ten months later at the annual Gonzaga Night revelry
that preceded the December break. Though it surely stretched Gonzaga’s notion of creditable theater, Bing, Corkery, and a
few friends offered
a minstrel burlesque of Shakespeare, depicting Caesar as a “dark-skinned bone artist.”
⁵¹
Their performance, a Bolshevik send-up of the Dirty Sixers who appeared in Pinky’s version, marked Bing’s second venture
into burnt cork. Blackface was then too much a show-business convention to elicit accusations of racism. A year earlier the
Spokane County Council of Defense put the First Amendment on hold to pass a resolution banning
The Birth of a Nation;
the same community had no qualms concerning traveling minstrel troupes and would have felt cheated had Al Jolson shown up
at the Auditorium in paleface.

In the spring the drama and glee clubs presented an Irish playlet,
The Curate of Kilronan,
at St. Aloysius, a production paced with several Irish songs. Once again Bing did not sing, but his acting earned him a notice
in the school magazine: he and another student had “used well their experience on the stage and acquitted themselves in fine
style as true friends of the unfortunate curate.”
⁵²
Bing and his brother Ted were feted afterward at a cast banquet at the Spokane Hotel.

While Bing was charming his way through school, exhibiting less ambition than verve, displaying varied talents that never
quite came into focus, Ted nursed his desire to write and worked at it like a professional. Ted was one of
Gonzaga’s
most enterprising and prolific contributors, and in his senior year he edited the alumni section. During the summer he interned
at the
Spokane Evening Chronicle,
where Larry worked after the war. But everything seemed to fall into Bing’s lap, not least the devotion of their mother and
a stable of friends. An occasional truant, Bing was all too familiar with the Jug, a room where unruly students atoned by
memorizing the Latin of Virgil, Ovid, Caesar — backward, if the offense was serious.
⁵³
Ted, on the other hand, was as steady as they come. Yet even the priests preferred Bing, perhaps because they were gung-ho
on sports, and Ted was the only Crosby boy who ducked athletics. Bing sparkled and Ted plodded.