Bing Crosby (13 page)

Bing was as diligent as one could be about wearing the green beanie required of freshmen. “There is one thing that beats snipe
shootin’ and that is hunting Freshmen without green caps,” the
Register
contended.
⁵
He matriculated as a member of the largest freshman class so far, at an exciting time in the school’s history. That year
Gonzaga hired the nationally known coach and former Notre Dame quarterback Gus Dorais.
⁶
Thanks to Dorais, whose tenure exactly paralleled Bing’s (Dorais was long regarded as second only to Bing in bringing recognition
to the school), the next four years proved to be the university’s golden age of football. Bing was too small to play on the
invincible football and basketball teams, but he made his enthusiasm known and was elected to the new advisory board on athletics
as one of two assistant yell leaders. In his sophomore year he and
thirty-four other students tried out for two baseball teams. Bing made the cut, and Dorais assigned him third base.
⁷

All school sports were supervised by the advisory board, controlled by its moderator, Curtis J. Sharp, S.J., a robust personality
and erstwhile amateur boxer who had recently arrived at Gonzaga from Anaconda, Montana. He was to Bing an exemplary figure,
combining harsh discipline with amiable generosity. Armed with a leather strap that he applied to the backsides of younger
students and the hands of older ones, Sharp nonetheless inspired a fervent devotion, perhaps too much so. As a parent, Bing
would obtain “a big leather belt — similar to the one I’d backed up to at Gonzaga in the hand of Father Sharp.”
⁸
Bing acquired more than a trust in corporal punishment from Sharp. He admired his poise, his man’s-man rectitude, and regular-Joe
disposition. Bing often told how in 1937, when he brought his radio show to Gonzaga for a homecoming game and received an
honorary degree, he slipped into the locker room to swig the remainder of a pint. In burst Father Sharp. Bing stashed the
bottle — “an instinctive return to the habits of my student years.”
⁹
As they small-talked their way out the door, Sharp suddenly stepped back to where Bing had been sitting and retrieved the
hidden flask. He emptied it with a gulp and observed, “It wouldn’t be right to let a soldier die without a priest.”
¹⁰
It was Sharp on whom Bing modeled Father O’Malley in
Going My Way.

Two other instructors Bing had reason to recall with more than usual regard were Father Edward Shipsey and James Gilmore.
Shipsey, the chairman of the English department, helped train Bing in elocution, teaching him to roll rs, carol vowels, assert
consonants, and distinguish the elements, patterns, and meanings of speech. Bing memorized and delivered with gusto recitations
by Elijah Kellogg, the nineteenth-century clergyman who wrote “Spartacus to the Gladiators”; Robert W. Service, the popular
Canadian poet responsible for “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”; and others. He once said, “If I am not a singer, I am a phraser.
Diseur
is the word. I owe it all to elocution.” The enunciation tricks learned from Father Shipsey became habit and mask, a front
underscored by his affection for ten-dollar words, faux-British circumlocutions, and spiel worthy of riverboat gamblers. Bing’s
diction would define his radio persona, frequently bordering on intentional self-parody.

James Gilmore, a young, well-liked chemistry instructor who led field trips throughout Spokane and sang a good bass harmony,
was obsessed with inventing a tonic to grow hair. He recruited Bing as a guinea pig, an indication that the diseur’s thinning
hair was noticeable even in his teens. While his friends were sheared at the on-campus Blue & White Shop (“Tonsorial Art by
Tonsorial Artists”), Bing endured private sessions with Mr. Gilmore, who — though unable to save his leery volunteer from
a life sentence of “scalp doilies” — eventually brought to market a product called Gilmore Hair-More.
¹¹
Bing grew to care less. Alone among the Hollywood stars of his era and stature, he never concealed his reliance on or distaste
for toupees. Unlike John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart, who never appeared without them, Bing wore his only for professional purposes,
when he could not get by with a hat. Errol Flynn was so amused by Bing’s willingness to attend sporting events, restaurants,
and parties without a rug that he once walked over to his table and planted a (photographed) kiss on top of Bing’s bare head.
Film work was another story. When submitted a script, Bing counted the outdoor scenes where a hat could square the issue,
and sometimes demanded more. Writers accommodated him; wardrobe provided every kind of hat, cap, and turban imaginable.

Bing maintained a B average in his freshman year, excelling in English. But playacting and music were becoming increasingly
important to him, and he emerged as a school favorite, rivaling his friend and supreme big man on campus Mike Pecarovich.
Mike was the tall, handsome student council president, gifted athlete (a disciple of Dorais, he later coached Gonzaga and
Loyola), and leading man in Gonzaga theatricals. He was two years older than Bing, who first supported, then costarred, and
finally eclipsed him; Mike could neither sing nor get laughs. Yet most would have bet on Mike to succeed, especially after
he appeared in a production of
The Bells
at Santa Clara University and, according to the
Spokane Daily Chronicle,
“drew raves from California critics.”
¹²
If Bing minded in the least playing second fiddle, he must have enjoyed the sublime revenge, a dozen years later, of giving
him bit parts in a few pictures. By the 1990s, Gonzaga students could stroll through Pecarovich Field and study at Crosby
Library.

A month into his first semester, Bing performed in a musical program at a smoker with the short-lived Republican Quartette,
including his accomplice from the Boone Avenue gang Ralph Foley. Despite the cynical election of Warren G. Harding to the
presidency that season, the GOP was not yet synonymous with plutocratic conservatism, certainly not in the state of Washington,
where Republicanism was associated with statehood, achieved over long-term Democratic opposition.

A musical event of greater import that year was the release of Paul Whiteman’s first record, “Whispering” and “The Japanese
Sandman,” which sold 2.5 million copies. Whiteman’s dance music was far more grounded in Viennese salons than in jazz, yet
that record captured the attention of an era, with its novel slide-whistle solo (to which no less than King Oliver paid homage
in his 1923 “Sobbin’ Blues”) and gentle Dixieland ingredients like muted brasses and lively banjo-driven rhythms. Whiteman
would dominate the recording industry for the next decade, until Bing supplanted him. His records, released on an average
of one a month, enchanted Bing and countless other would-be musicians around the country.

A few weeks later the Gonzaga Dramatic Club presented the comedy
The Dean of Ballarat
in St. Aloysius Hall, to benefit the student band. “Each player seemed especially fitted for his part,” the school paper
reported, noting that Bing portrayed “a colored aristocrat with the dignity and willingness to receive ‘tips’ so common to
that class.”
¹³
He billed himself as Harry L. Crosby, Jr., A.B. ’24, for the first time, suggesting an attempt to try on his father for size,
and at least a subliminal acknowledgment that acting was serious stuff but also an improvident activity belonging to the Happy
Harry sphere of life. Shortly before the semester ended, he again appeared in blackface, for Gonzaga University Glee Club’s
minstrel show A
Study in Tone and Color.
Only Bing was featured twice — in a duet with Dirty Sixer Joe Lynch, on “That Shakespearian Rag,” and as soloist on “When
the Moon Shines.” He also played one of four end men who “kept the entire audience in a continuous uproar.”
¹⁴
Whatever appeal blackface had for the other end men (among them Leo Lynn), for Bing it represented a bond with the mighty
Al Jolson, whose talents he broadly emulated.
¹⁵

* * *

The importance of minstrelsy in the development of America’s popular arts can hardly be overstated, and Crosby was steeped
in it. The genesis of American minstrelsy has been credited to an English music-hall performer, Charles Matthews, who while
touring the South in 1822 became intrigued with Negro music and dialect. Blackening his face with burnt cork, he offered himself
as an interpreter of “Ethiopian” melodies. Contemporaneously, a group of black performers in New York, frustrated because
Negro patrons were not allowed to attend theaters, staged
Richard III
at the corner of Mercer and Bleecker Streets. They did not get to tour the country. The minstrels did. Negro minstrelsy,
as it was called regardless of the performers’ race, was the only acceptable conduit for what was thought of as native Negro
artistry. Though antebellum troupes were white, the form developed in a forced racial collaboration, illustrating the axiom
that defined — and continues to define — American music as it developed over the next century and a half: African American
innovations metamorphose into American popular culture when white performers learn to mimic black ones.

In 1830 a showman named Joel W. Sweeney perfected and popularized the modern banjo, an instrument he had learned to play from
slaves on his father’s Virginia plantation; it would become minstrelsy’s dominant instrument. That same year, Thomas “Daddy”
Rice happened to see a black Louisville stablehand do a whirling dance while singing about a character named Jim Crow; Rice
made off with the step and the song, and embarked on a prominent career. For the sake of authenticity, Rice also blacked his
face with cork, a custom that lasted a century — until the introduction of Pan-Cake makeup, which facilitated the tradition
just as it was drawing to an end. (Cork was arduous to remove, and the pros soon learned to use soap and cold water only,
as warm water or cream pressed it into the pores like gunshot.)

The first successful blackface company, the Virginia Minstrels, debuted in New York in 1843. (One of its four members, Dan
Emmett, would later adapt a black melody for his most durable song, “Dixie.”) The next year, 1844, William Henry Lane, a black
trick dancer who performed under the name Master Juba, humbled the popular “Ethiopian imitators” in a dancing competition.
It did him no good: the blacked-up imitators dominated minstrelsy in the decades before Reconstruction, rallying American
songwriting to its first ereative
and commercial peak. That summit was symbolized in 1848 by the publication of Stephen Fosters “Oh! Susanna,” described by
cultural historian Constance Rourke as “a fiddler’s tune with a Negro beat and a touch of pathos in the melody.”
¹⁶

Minstrelsy was a theatrical mode premised upon the conceit that slave life could be illuminated and prettified by a gallery
of grotesques. Its performers had to balance parodic intent with sincere imitation. Caricatures became standardized: the shiftless
plantation layabout, Jim Crow; the fatuous urban dandy, Zip Coon; the addled pickaninny, Sambo. Yet many minstrels thought
of themselves as actors communicating truths about Negro life, as if the stereotypes were roles as valid as Othello and Aida.
¹⁷
In time, the caricatures took on lives of their own, removed from the original intent. “The function of this mythology,”
Ralph Ellison observed, “was to allow whites a more secure place (if only symbolically) in American society.”
¹⁸
But for the last generation of white blackface performers, the Negro-ness was all but forgotten. Bob Hope, who did a blackface
act in vaudeville, said of the genre’s passing, “People thought they were making fun of blacks, but it was just a way of playing
characters, you know? Minstrel shows were very large. At one theater where I was playing and getting very little money, I
got to the theater late and I didn’t have time to put the black on and so I walked out with my regular face. After the show,
the theater manager came back and said, ‘Don’t put that stuff on your face, You got a face that saves jokes.’ In those days,
you did blackface but you downplayed the minstrel aspect.”
¹⁹

In the mid-nineteenth century, as Stephen Foster and other songwriters improved the musical fare, crude dialect songs were
replaced by a genteel but equally pernicious type of song, expressing yearnings for the protective hand of dear ol’ massa.
After the Civil War the minstrel palette became much broader. “If the Negro was set free,” Constance Rourke realized, “in
a fashion his white impersonators were also liberated.”
²⁰
With other minorities streaming into the country, minstrel conventions broadened to include caricaturing Italians, Irish,
Jews, Germans, Dutch, Scottish, Indians, Chinese (Asians provided the most durable actors’ mask of all)
²¹
— any group sufficiently different or mysterious enough to warrant parodic deflation. Even women, long imitated by male actors,
were invited to participate, although female impersonators never lost their box-office seduction.
“In fantasy, the American types seemed to be joining in a single semblance,” Rourke wrote. “But Negro music and Negro nonsense
still prevailed,”
²²

At its height, minstrelsy was a stylized, codified, and even ritualized variety show. At center stage was the stout announcer,
Mr. Interlocutor, who kibitzed with the end-men comics, Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones. Between them sat the company — as many as
seventy men in the larger companies, all corked, bewigged, and attired in loud, mockingly overstated costumes. After an introductory
segment of jokes and songs, the olio (variety acts) got under way, presenting dancers, singers, mimics, monologists, sketches,
mini-plays, guest performers, and so on. The climax was a walk-around finale, when the entire company let loose on unison
banjos or tambourines for a rousing send-off. As an idiom that squelched individuality, minstrelsy inevitably inspired fantasies
about disguise. Jolson’s film
Mammy
concerns a murderer hiding out in a minstrel troupe. (Well, Officer, he had coal black skin, a huge mouth, kinky hair, and
white gloves.) In
The Jolson Story
Al gets his big break by impersonating another performer who can’t go on; no one notices the substitution. In dozens of Hollywood
comedies, many starring Bugs Bunny, a faceful of soot triggers a total racial makeover. Before Bing can scrub black paint
off his face in Mack Sennett’s
Dream House,
a black director hires him as a black actor.