Bing Crosby (17 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Dorothy,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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