Bing Crosby (31 page)

Francis Cork O’Keefe, the dapper manager who later advised Bing, also saw him at the Philadelphia engagement, having taken
the train
from New York because “people had been raving about a guy with Whiteman.” He found Bing “nervous and shy.”
³¹
O’Keefe may have been the first to suggest that he go out as a single, but Bing dismissed the idea; he did not even want
to make a record under his own name. “I sat in the first row,” O’Keefe told an interviewer in 1946. “Harry Barris was the
piano player, the clown of the crowd. Bing had the worst sore throat, but I heard him and liked him. I went backstage to say
hello to the guys and met him. He had something, but then he was just another one of the fellows. They were trying to get
him to make a solo record, but he laughed — said it was silly, no one wanted to hear him alone.”
³²
O’Keefe worked on him for better than a year, to no avail. He was not ready.

Bing was more focused on Ginger Meehan, a quietly pretty, Brooklyn-born brunette with delicate features — just the type he
preferred. One night in New York, at nearly 1:00
A.M
., Bing wired Ginger at Philadelphia’s Emerson Hotel:
ACCORDING TO US STATISTICS THERE
ARE 7 MILLION PEOPLE HERE BUT WITHAL IM A STRANGER AND MISERABLY ALONE BECAUSE YOURE NOT ALONG LOVE UNDYING BEST REGARDS
TO DOLORES AND STUFF. BING.
³³
The affair continued on and off through the summer. When Whiteman pulled into Chicago in July, Ginger was already there,
in the road company of
Good News.
Bing wired her at the Selwyn Theater:
WOULD LIKE TO SAY HELLO THIS EVE
AFTER YOUR PERFORMANCE SAY AT ELEVEN FIFTEEN. BING.
³⁴
Six days later he wired her a few minutes before she went onstage:
WOULD
LIKE TO CALL YOU TONIGHT IF BUSY SUE ME BING.
³⁵
Ginger didn’t Sue, but the romance fizzled, possibly because Bing became enamored of another
Good News
cast member, the star, Peggy Bernier, whom he had met twice before — at Don Clark’s recording session and in Jack Partington’s
San Francisco revues. Bing’s infatuation with Peggy, who could keep up with his late-night carousing, lasted several months,
unlike most of his romances, which were as fleeting as stops on a vaudeville circuit.

The good life took its toll on the Rhythm Boys. Whiteman complained that they no longer seemed as dedicated to their work.
They stayed out late and looked beat at the early matinees. When the movie went on, they would repair to a nearby speakeasy
and sometimes could hardly tear themselves away in time to make the next show. Merwyn Bogue,a worshipful young Whiteman fan
who
became popular in the 1930s as Kay Kyser’s trumpet player and comic foil, Ish Kabibble, got a close look at them on and off
the bandstand. He first saw the Rhythm Boys when Whiteman opened at the Perry Theater in Erie, Pennsylvania. “The audience
went wild”
³⁶
as the trio, backed by Rinker on a tiny organ, belted out “Mississippi Mud.” Bogue attended all four shows every day of the
engagement, and designated himself the boys’ guardian after he tailed them to a speakeasy one afternoon:

The boys muttered a password through the little peephole. A door opened, and we all went inside. The owner must have considered
me part of the group. But nobody knew me from Bephus, and I sat off in a corner by myself. The three of them got something
to drink, scooped handfuls of peanuts from a glass penny machine, and sat telling stories. I was so afraid they would be late
for their next show that I appointed myself their timekeeper…. When I finally said [“Hey, fellows, you better start walking
back or you’ll miss your next show”], they looked at me as if to say, “Who are you?” But they got up and left. After this
had happened a few more times, one of them said, “Thanks kid.” They were never late for a show that whole week.
³⁷

In 1949, when Ish Kabibble had a spot in the Crosby movie
Riding High,
he asked Bing “if he remembered a kid in an Erie speakeasy who always got him to the theater on time. He did a double take,
swung his golf club at another wad of Kleenex, and said, ‘Was that you? Hey, those were the greatest peanuts I ever ate!’
“

The boys’ most grievous sin was their failure to “grow the act.” Whiteman assigned them roles on recordings, but he expected
them to develop new material for concerts and their own record dates (which, like the band’s, were made at Columbia). In Bing’s
estimation, “I don’t think we were too serious about our work, it was just something we liked to do, we enjoyed it and never
really made a conscious effort to improve ourselves. Although we looked for new material all the time, it was difficult to
get all three of us together at one time for a rehearsal. About the only time we did is when Whiteman had something for us
to do with the big band and then we had to be there or we’d get the old sack.”
³⁸

Whiteman had no intention of firing them, but he was losing patience and noticed that some theater audiences continued to
resist
the trio’s charms. As
Variety
observed, “There seem to be a lot of people in a picture house audience who don’t know what they’re trying to do or what
it’s all about, but it’s funny, hot, and good.”
³⁹
In July Whiteman summoned the boys to his office and, as Barris recalled, told them, “I’m taking the band on tour and if
it’s okay with you, I’d like to place you on a vaudeville circuit.”
⁴⁰
They had little choice. In a sense, Paul was exiling them from the band. He hoped that independence would straighten them
out and spur their creativity. If they could cultivate audiences on their own, they would be a more attractive component in
the orchestra’s presentations when he brought them home. Meantime, he would be increasing his income, taking a percentage
of their tour in addition to receipts generated by the band. Paul promised that they would rejoin the orchestra when it returned
to New York and that in the interim he would continue to use them on records.

On August 1 he gave the news to the press: the Rhythm Boys would be playing the Keith-Albee, Orpheum, and Proctor vaudeville
circuit. Whiteman did, as he promised, bring them in for several studio sessions, but otherwise the boys were on their own
for six months, through February 1929. While the band toured in the East, the Rhythm Boys traveled to their first stop: the
Proctor Theater in Yonkers. They played most major Midwestern cities and a few eastern ones, dipping as far south as Nashville,
usually to great acclaim. At each venue they were introduced by a life-size plywood cutout of Paul and a transcription of
his voice. “Ladies and gentlemen,” it proclaimed, “I take great pleasure in presenting to you my Rhythm Boys.”
⁴¹

They began the tour in high spirits. The double challenge of big-time vaudeville and autonomy invigorated them, though not
musically. For a while they worked out a comedy dance routine to “Baby Face,” taking turns as they parodied what Al described
as “dime-a-dozen dance routines by second rate hoofers.”
⁴²
Despite the jokey intent, those “corny” steps proved a useful part of Bing’s apprenticeship; he used them throughout his
career, not only in routines with Bob Hope and Fred Astaire but in comic time steps and hand gestures that defined his persona
in numerous films and TV shows. The boys also worked out a comic mind-reading routine, with Harry and Al engaging the audience
as Bing did the swami bit onstage in a turban (prefiguring a routine in the 1946
Road to Utopia).
Bing
acknowledged, “We had indifferent success. We went up and down. It depended. See, we’d been in vaudeville a lot and we’d been
watching a lot of comics and we wanted to do comedy. And as a result, we weren’t singing hardly anything. And the managers
of the different hotels and theaters objected to this strenuously. They thought they were booking a record seller, you know.”
⁴³

Playing only two shows a day, beginning at 2:00
P.M
., Bing and Al spent mornings on the golf course, renewing their friendship and perfecting their games; they played about
equally well and always for a small amount of money. To their surprise, most of the best private courses in each city granted
them admission. Harry didn’t play, but he kept busy writing songs and nursing his flask. In Columbus, Ohio, they shared a
bill with Jack Benny, who, learning of their mania for golf, asked whether he could join Bing and Al in a game. They had already
made arrangements at the Scioto Country Club (where Jack Nicklaus learned to play) and so changed their reservation to a threesome,
arriving early the next morning in their plus fours. After three or four holes, Bing hit his ball over a fence into a cow
pasture. “That’s a new ball,” Bing complained, and climbed over the fence to get it.
⁴⁴
As he searched the pasture, Al and Jack heard a frightful bellowing and turned to see a mammoth black bull galloping toward
Bing. As they yelled warnings, Bing took off like buckshot, barely making it over the fence in time. Shaken, they laughed
it off, as they tended to do with most things.

The Rhythm Boys usually managed to look good onstage in their blue blazers and white flannels. Harry stood five foot six but
usually sat at the piano; Bing was five nine and Al five ten.
Variety
recognized them as a potential hit “with the younger generation, particularly the flaps [girls]”
⁴⁵
but was less pleased with the material. Robert Landry, who had written the first review of Bing and Al in San Francisco and
was now reporting from New York, saw “ample room for improvement” in the fifteen-minute act: “Little too much of sameness
about the horseplay. More rhythm and melody and less slamming of the music rack suggested.” With “elimination and improvements,”
he thought, they would be “a consistent zowie.”
⁴⁶
They ignored the advice, preferring to rack up hilarity on- and offstage.

Bing’s favorite city on tour was Chicago, where the trio played one week in September and another in November. As he grew
friendly
with Louis Armstrong, they began to inspire each other. Bing had learned much from Louis about style, spontaneity, time, and
feeling. Armstrong was the fount from which Bing’s swinging and irreverent but emotional approach to song developed. Louis
returned the admiration, picking up on Bing’s timbre and his way with ballads, which he soon added to his repertoire. Occasionally
Louis even paid Bing homage by covering his songs or inserting a telling mordent. Writing in the 1960s to a friend, he discussed
Bing at length: “Shortly after I witnessed my first hearing of Bing’s singing, he started making records with his Trio and
different bands. Then, later, by himself. And
that did
settle it. There were just as many colored people ‘buying air,’ raving over Bing’s recordings, as much as anybody else. The
chicks (gals) were justa swooning and screaming when Bing would sing…. The man was a Natural Genius the day he was born. Ever
since Bing first opened his mouth, he was the
Boss of All Singers
and Still is.”
⁴⁷

One night Armstrong took Charlie Carpenter, his valet and subsequently a lyricist (“You Can Depend on Me”) and Earl Hines’s
manager, to the Grand Terrace Ballroom, which stayed open until 4:30
A.M
. The Rhythm Boys stopped by at 2:00, after finishing their own gig. Charlie was too young to drink but marveled at Bing’s
thirst. When he ran into Bing thirty years later on a television soundstage, he told him, “I haven’t seen you since 1928,
Bing, but I still remember you were tore up.” Bing laughed and said, “I probably was because in those days I was really putting
it away.”
⁴⁸
He was consuming more than liquor.

Louis’s influence on Bing extended to his love of marijuana, which he alternately called mezz (after Mezz Mezzrow), gage,
pot, or muggles. Bing didn’t develop the lifelong appetite for it that Louis did, but he enjoyed it in the early days — it
was legal — and, like Louis, surprised interviewers in the 1960s and 1970s by suggesting it be decriminalized, to set it apart
from more harmful and addictive drugs. Bing’s eldest son, Gary, argued that pot had a lasting effect on his father’s style:
“If you look at the way he sang and the way he walked and talked, you could make a pretty good case for somebody who was loaded.
He said to me one time when he was really mad, ranting and raving about my heavy drinking, he said, ‘Oh, that fucking booze.
It killed your mother. Why don’t you just smoke shit?’ That was all he said but there were other times when marijuana was
mentioned and he’d get a smile on his face. He’d kind of think about it and there’d be that little smile.”
⁴⁹

Gary’s theory is hardly the strangest explanation of Bing’s preternatural cool, which in the early years of his career suggested
indifference rather than the composure for which he became famous. It was as if he had not fully committed himself to the
idea of making himself a success. He made no attempt to hide his stumbling inconsistency, except in letters home, which were
often accompanied by mementos and gifts. His younger brother, Bob, finishing high school, received regular updates on Bing’s
fortunes: “He’d write me quite often, tell me about the cities he played and what was happening in the orchestra. He sent
me records of the original Dorsey brothers band and a lot of jazz things with Frankie Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke and some
of the great musicians; a lot of Louie Armstrong, that was one of his favorites. Told me at one time, ‘I’m sending you a tennis
racket and a whole tennis outfit. I want you to learn how to play tennis because that’s a great way to meet people.’And he
sent me from Saks Fifth Avenue a very expensive racket and beautiful sweater and the shoes and the whole thing and a book
of instructions by Bill Tilden.”
⁵⁰

About that time, Bing posed — uncharacteristically natty — for an eight-by-ten sepia portrait, his hands tucked into the pockets
of a double-breasted jacket, with a handkerchief peaking from the breast pocket, and his tie carefully arranged with a dimple
below the knot. His eyes are luminous and his hair thinning; a rakish, ready smile is crowned by an exactingly trimmed mustache.
In his caption on a copy he sent his brother Ted, Bing wrote, “brush by Fuller.” His inscription also included a question
without a question mark: “Am I too suave or sveldt.”
⁵¹