Bing Crosby (15 page)

Watching
Sinbad
from the sidelines invigorated Bing, and he participated in several theatrical events his sophomore year. At a vaudeville
benefit for Gonzaga High School’s sports program, he took two turns, playing a satirical sketch with a friend, billed as Ray
and Bing, and singing comical songs, as Harry Crosby. In a review of
It Pays to Advertise,
a three-act comedy presented by the Varsity Drama Club, Bing was the only cast member singled out by the student reviewer:
“Harry Crosby as the genial press agent ‘Ambrose Peale’ kept the audience in a constant uproar.”
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A production of the Henry Irving vehicle
The Bells
by the school’s Henry Irving Dramatic Society, merited a preview in the
Spokane Daily Chronicle,
which published head shots of the three principals, including Bing, bow-tied and grinning.

Bing displayed few signs of discontent that year, holding his own in class while playing baseball for the varsity and the
semipro Ideal Laundry teams. He won a Distinguished citation in English and a Premium (second place) citation in debating.
Math and chemistry were problematic, and Father Kennelly made a point of saying that he was worried about Bing’s performance
in the latter. Bing told him with breezy candor, “Well, Father, there’s no use both of us worrying about it.” Kennelly may
have been too thunderstruck to launch his key ring, but he was a lot angrier when he heard noises one night in front of the
Administration Building and marched over for a look. He found Bing supervising a pulley system as his confederates inside
attempted to lower to the ground, piece by piece, a set of school drums. Bing, who needed them for a last-minute gig, had
previously
succeeded in borrowing the drums on several occasions. Getting caught convinced him to save up for a set of his own.

Among his summer jobs was a brief stint at Harry’s company, the former Inland Brewery, where he whiled away the time discussing
the frustrations of making near beer (they brewed the real article, then “pasteurized it until it was the sissified prohibition
stuff”) with an old German braumeister. His job was to roll and upend barrels of cucumbers into the briny vats for pickling,
and he hated it. He quit after two weeks and never developed a liking for pickles. He did develop an appetite for true beer,
not without inadvertent encouragement from his father, who now and then asked him to “rush the can.” Local speakeasies sold
beer in large tin cans with tops and handles, and Harry would give Bing a quarter to fetch one. When Bing siphoned off some
of it himself, he would tell Harry that a bunch of kids had chased him and it spilled. That was known as “dropping the can.”
One speakeasy Bing knew pretty well was operated by a former fight promoter and con man turned bootlegger. His name was Charles
Dale, and he kept the back room of his popular establishment stocked with liquor brought back in suitcases from periodic trips
to Butte. Music by bands a lot better than the Dizzy Seven helped Dale lure customers.

Yet notwithstanding an occasional snifter or tin can, Bing hewed to the straight and narrow. Returning for his third year,
he enrolled in the School of Law, taking advantage of a program that would confer A.B. and LL.B degrees in six years — two
in the College of Arts and Sciences, four in law. His schedule was characteristically full. He attended regular courses in
the forenoons and returned to campus five nights a week, between seven and nine, for classes in law. During afternoons, he
worked in the office of Charles Albert, an attorney for the Great Northern Railway. Albert’s widow, actress Sarah Truax, repeated
her husband’s favorite story about his former clerk, a likable boy who disappeared from the office to rehearse or nail down
engagements for his band. Colonel Albert finally insisted that the stage-struck fellow give his full time to show business.
When he saw him next, Bing was pulling down $3,000 a week.

Law may have appealed to Bing’s sense of theatricality — it is the one career other than politics that routinely turns out
real-life Mr.
Interlocutors. In any case, the decision was not made lightly. When Bing registered for law school, he had not been tested
as an entertainer or musician outside school productions. Even by high-school standards, the Dizzy Seven was undistinguished.
The workload he embraced indicates his determination to make good on his parents’ investment and create his future. Bing buried
himself in a curriculum of contracts and quasi-contracts, criminal law, torts, property, logic, procedure (legal bibliography),
and debate. Membership in the Debating Society was mandatory for students in the special program, as was attaining thirty
credits toward the A.B. He now paid less attention to sports and stagecraft. But working for Colonel Albert brought home the
disenchanting truth that lawyering entails more drudgery than drama and was not the instant platform for Ciceronian eloquence
suggested by the examples of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Second semester, Bing was back on the boards.

The
Spokane Daily Chronicle
for February 8, 1923, reported rehearsals for an upcoming performance of George M. Cohan’s
Seven Keys to Baldpate,
presented by the Gonzaga Dramatic Club with Mike Pecarovich as the lead. Yet the sole accompanying photo was a head shot
of Bing (bow tie, big smile), who played the role of Lou Max, “the crooked mayor s man ‘Friday,’ the humorous feature of the
cast.”
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Bing was described as one of the drama club’s “old-timers.” The priest who directed the play selected his cast from the entire
student body, reported the
Chronicle,
for a version of the play Cohan had specially revised for the East Coast Jesuit school, Fordham. In May the Monogram Club
presented a sweater to Father Sharp in recognition of his work in assisting Gonzaga sports. An evening of burlesque and music
ensued, during which Bing acted in a three-man comedy sketch and sang in unison with the Gonzaga Harmony Trio.

Enrolling in his fourth year, he continued to work part-time for Charles Albert in the afternoons and took an additional job
as night watchman for the Great Northern Railway, studying in a room in its tower on Havermale Island. An acute if fleeting
depression hit the country that year, and inevitably the Crosbys felt the impact. Harry, who had been listed in the company
books as secretary, was once again let go and then rehired as shipping clerk at a reduced salary. Inland now offered commercial
storage in addition to “22 Varieties.”
The economic shortfall derailed the ambitions of Bing’s eldest sister, Catherine, who upon graduating Holy Names Academy told
a reporter that she expected to study music in the East. She remained at home. Everett returned from Seattle and worked as
a bookkeeper, but soon left to rejoin the bootlegging trade. Larry worked for the
Chronicle,
as did Ted, who concluded his education with a bang, editing the
Gonzaga Bulletin
and graduating from the School of Philosophy of Letters.

Ted never stopped turning out stories, poems, and essays for the college paper. One tale, “Sunny Skies,” tells of an abused
wife named Grace Crossland, tormented by a hard-drinking husband and afraid to leave her Westchester mansion. That changes
after she visits a dude ranch and meets a cowboy named Hale, who greets people with the phrase “sunny skies.” Hale follows
Grace home to New York, dispatches her husband, and returns with her to Rancho Los Pinos. The story is chillingly prophetic:
Bing’s wife Dixie suffered a mild form of agoraphobia, rarely leaving their estate, and though Bing was never the brute of
Ted’s story, he did drive her away with his drinking early in their marriage. But the truly prescient character is Hale, who
emphatically anticipates the public Bing: the cool, capable, optimistic, ail-American go-getter who loves horses, operates
ranches, and invariably gets the girl.
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Bing enjoyed one final theatrical triumph at Gonzaga, when he reprised his role as Ambrose Peale in
It Pays to Advertise,
in November. What turned out to be his last appearance in a school production netted him his first genuine newspaper review.
After praising the Gonzaga Dramatic Club for focusing on plays that allow women’s roles to be “blue pencilled,” to eliminate
feminine impersonation (and prove that a drama club can “get along without a woman”), the
Spokane Daily Chronicle’s
critic praised Pecarovich and Crosby for carrying off “the play’s hilarious moments” and continued: “Mr. Crosby bursts over
with spontaneity in getting his amusing lines across the footlights.”
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Neither school, work, nor drama diminished Bing’s appetite for music. He listened to everything and without prejudice. He
belonged to a generation so dazzled by the sheer availability of diverse music that it did not, unlike subsequent generations,
distinguish between
hip and square, swing or Mickey Mouse. The only criteria that mattered were whether a performance was interesting and well
executed. The father of one of Bing’s friends was a record distributor, so many of the latest numbers were available to him.
Ted’s crystal machine also got a workout. Above all, Bing and his friends spent hours listening to records at Bailey’s music
shop. They stayed until they were thrown out, rarely buying anything. The mid-1920s signaled an electrifying moment in American
music. Jazz and blues were not yet codified as strictly defined genres; there was, instead, a general sense of jazziness and
bluesiness. Musical influences from everywhere were fermenting into a whole new brew, and no one could imagine where it would
lead; every month brought new sounds to marvel at. Paul Whiteman introduced a nervy Gershwin tune called “I’ll Build a Stairway
to Paradise.” Some listeners were delighted by its bold use of a seventh chord, but most fans were more taken with the trumpet
solo, which interpolated two twelve-bar blues choruses right in the middle. A fellow making records under the name Ukelele
Ike sang bawdy songs with jazz pizzazz and backed himself on hot ukelele and kazoo. Jolson, who had recorded novelties, now
introduced more substantial melodies like “April Showers” and “Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’ Bye).” Dance bands paved new ground
and gave Whiteman a run for his money — Fred Waring with “Sleep” and Isham Jones with “It Had to Be You.”

Many new songs bore the stamp of the South. A group of Whiteman musicians calling themselves the Virginians scored with “I
Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.” The Peerless Quartet, a perennial on the Crosby gramophone, released “’Way Down
Yonder in New Orleans.” Arthur Gibbs popularized a new dance with his record of “Charleston.” Not everyone understood the
racial collusion taking place in the music world, though many who did were outraged and delivered stringent imprecations.
Ladies’ Home Journal
located a cause and effect between jazz and rape, and cautioned its readers, “Jazz is the expression of protest against law
and order, the bolshevik element of license striving for expression in music.”
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It wasn’t entirely wrong: jazz was widely associated with people who broke the law by drinking bootleg hooch in speakeasies.
Rape was a stretch, but then most of the jeremiads employed the word to hyperbolize the greater threat of women who freely
expressed their sexuality. Liquor,
Ogden Nash wrote, is quicker, and so a syllogism took root: jazz abets drinking, and drinking abets sex; therefore, jazz abets
sex, which practiced under the influence of liquor amounts to rape. That
Ladies’ Home Journal
failed to hear any musical value in jazz is almost immaterial.

Greater still than the sexual panic was the racial one. To most young people, the hot new music was simply liberating. Few
outside the largest cities comprehended how far it went in transgressing the color line. Bing and his friends, for example,
probably had no way of knowing that the three songs mentioned above (“I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” “’Way Down
Yonder in New Orleans,” “Charleston”), though popularized by white bands, were composed by blacks, two of whom were no more
southern than Bing. But Crosby had to realize he was witnessing the vanguard of a music brimming with catchy melodies, exciting
rhythms, and weird harmonies, an inclusive multicolored all-American music.

Inspired by Ukelele Ike (Cliff Edwards), Bing carried his father’s banjo-uke to outings at Liberty Lake. He never became proficient
on it, though he got some mileage from Ike’s other instrument, the kazoo. That autumn Bing finally saved up enough to buy
a set of drums from a mail-order catalog. The bass drum had a Japanese sunset painted on the skin, which could be illuminated
by a bulb inside; a gooseneck cymbal waved from the rim. Those drums were perhaps the most significant purchase Bing would
ever make, because news of their arrival circulated as far as North Central High School, where a student piano player named
Alton Rinker led a small band that avoided stock arrangements in favor of charts he copied by ear from the latest jazz records.
Rinker had a problem. The drummer was no good, and the other boys let him go before he could find a replacement. So when he
heard about a law student who lived nearby on East Sharp, with a new set of traps, he figured he’d give him a call.