Bing Crosby (38 page)

From the time her father enrolled her in an amateur contest, she handled each show-business opportunity with aplomb. By the
time she was eighteen, Dixie possessed a glamorously quizzical expression, as if she saw irony lurking everywhere. She was
a knockout, with large brown eyes, a full lower lip, round cheeks to cushion a firm nose, and blond (or red or natural brown,
depending on the year) hair falling in waves down the right side of her face. Men found her captivating, but like Bing’s,
her appeal was genderproof; women were disarmed by her straight-arrow modesty. At five foot three and 115 pounds (as she informed
the editor of her hometown newspaper), she somehow conveyed stature. Rory Burke, daughter of Bing’s lyricist Johnny Burke,
thought she gave the illusion of height: “She had this tall look to her, lean and slim. I always think of her in a beautiful
white gown with that beautiful blond hair.”
³

She was born Wilma Winifred Wyatt on November 4, 1911, in a handsome plank house with pitched roofs and a small covered porch
in the Walnut Hill section of Harriman, Tennessee, to Evan Wyatt and the former Nora Scarbrough.
⁴
Her family had lived in Tennessee for generations; her grandfather, Jim Wyatt, was known throughout local counties as a singer
and vocal coach. Billie, as Wilma was known from early childhood, was four when the family relocated to Memphis. The move
may have been the result of her father’s career as an insurance salesman or may have stemmed from the desire to escape the
scene of tragedy: Billie’s two older sisters had died of rheumatic fever within a year of each other. After seven years in
Memphis, the Wyatts moved to New Orleans, where Billie grew friendly with the slightly older Boswell sisters (they later sang
offscreen in one of her movies), and then — when Billie was fourteen — to Chicago.
⁵
Three years later, she wryly recalled, “my theatrical career began.”
⁶

“I loved her dearly,” her lifelong friend Pauline Weislow recalled; they had met in high school. “Oh, she was very sweet,
most generous, but shy. Her parents were nice people, no money at all, really. I used to go over to her house and we would
borrow clothes from each other. Her dad would cut my hair when he cut hers. He was gentle, but he knew his own mind.”
⁷
Indeed, Mr. Wyatt was a voluble socialist given to tirades against organized religion. Billie was having a difficult time
in high school and spoke to Pauline of quitting, when — in May 1928 — her father entered her in an amateur “blues singing”
contest.
⁸
She made up a pseudonym “so all the kids wouldn’t know it was me if I lost.”
⁹
Performing as Dixie Carroll, she triumphed.

One of the judges was popular singer Ruth Etting, who must have noticed how much Dixie’s style owed to her own. Etting, apparently
flattered, took an interest in her. The contest prize was a job at a roadhouse, College Inn, and Etting and music publisher
Rocco Vocco arranged for Dixie to borrow a piano, pianist, and arrangements.
¹⁰
In October a talent scout passed through and offered her a part in the traveling company of
Good News,
which was then playing in Philadelphia. With her mother as chaperone, Dixie reluctantly agreed, realizing she would have
to learn to dance at rehearsals. That turned out not to be a problem. Dixie was so proficient that after six weeks she was
transferred to the Broadway company. When the star who created the role of Connie Lane, Mary Lawlor, became ill, Dixie subbed
for her for nearly two months. A Fox agent spotted her and signed her to a contract to take effect when she completed her
commitment to the show, which included a return to Chicago as lead understudy. When Dixie and her mother finally arrived in
Hollywood, Fox’s chief of production, Winfield Sheehan, informed them that there were already two young Carrolls in town,
Nancy Carroll and Sue Carol, and that her professional name would be Dixie Lee.

Dixie was quickly put to work and extensively promoted. “I was a big shot because I was a Broadway star,” she said, “yeah,
I’d been on Broadway seven weeks!”
¹¹
She was featured in two 1929 pictures,
Fox Movietone Follies
and
Why Leave Home?,
and rushed into five more for release in 1930.
¹²
In
Happy Days
she was given a flamboyant number, “Crazy Feet,” backed by thirty-two tap dancers.
¹³
So when Dixie reencountered Bing at a party in January 1930, she was several rungs up the ladder while he was a recently
paroled singer who had just been rejected for picture work by the very man who was investing heavily in Dixie.

Several people later claimed credit for their second meeting. Holly Hall, Dixie’s roommate back in Chicago, told her husband,
Bobby O’Brien (later a writer for Bing), that she made the match. But where? David Butler, who directed Dixie ten years before
he directed Bing (in
Road to Morocco
and others), said the party was at his place. Sol Wurtzel, who produced Dixie’s films at Fox, claimed the party was at his
place. Richard Keene, an actor who appeared in
Happy Days,
said he was the party’s host — but in July, by which time Bing and Dixie had been steadies for six months. The first to speak
up, however, was Marjorie White, an actress who appeared with Dixie in
Fox Movietone Follies
and
Happy Days
and said in the
Los Angeles Times
the week Bing and Dixie were wed that the party was at her place.
¹⁴
Wurtzel attained distinction of another kind, advising Dixie, “If you marry him, you’ll be supporting him for the rest of
your life.”
¹⁵
Others agreed, including Dixie’s father, who considered him “a useless, good-for-nothing type.”
¹⁶
Dixie never forgave those who disparaged her husband. “Everybody’s saying they made Bing,” she said years later. “The same
ones who told me, Don’t marry him — he’ll never amount to anything. Bing’s sweet to them, but I can’t be.”
¹⁷

That they deeply loved each other no one doubted. But though the marriage blossomed for the better part of a decade, publicly
extolled as a fairy-tale romance, the story of Bing and Dixie is not a happy one. In the shorthand of Hollywood mythology,
Dixie began drinking to keep up with Bing, then put her foot down and forced him to quit. As a result, his career took off
while hers disappeared. As insecure as Bing was confident, Dixie was not ungrateful to escape the limelight, but by then her
own drinking had gotten out of hand. Warning signs were apparent long before they tied the knot.

At first, Bing’s drinking was uncontained while Dixie’s was a less noticeable compulsion. Her high-school friend Pauline,
who later danced in
George White’s Scandals
and became a member of Dixie’s Hollywood support group, observed, “I think what happened was she tried to compete and she
was a shy person. She was afraid she couldn’t come up to the expectations of other people who she thought were so talented,
and she couldn’t really talk to people unless she’d had a drink. Bing was private and Dixie was not only private, but unable
to share anything that was wrong.”
¹⁸
Flo Haley, the widow of Jack Haley (the Tin Man in
The Wizard ofOz)
and for many years a Crosby neighbor, recalled Dixie as “a darling little girl. And she didn’t drink before she met Bing.
It was the waiting for him at night, after the show, before they went home, that she’d have a drink. He’d say, ‘One for the
road.’ But she didn’t have the tolerance he had. If she took more than two, it would bother her and then she’d have another
one.”
¹⁹
In her final years Dixie confided in her doctor and friend,
Dr. George J. Hummer, about her insecurities. “She was an introvert,” Hummer observed. “She said that she died every time
before she went onscreen or onstage. You’d never know it by looking at her work. But when she used to sit down and talk to
me about her stage fright, it was real, you know, very real.”
²⁰

Bing, though he denied it, was also familiar with stage fright, which he attempted — not always successfully — to curb with
drink. Before he courted Dixie, he was infatuated with an older, much-married beauty of the era, Adeline Lamont, who hunted
and drove racing cars and was known to friends as Buster. According to Buster’s daughter-in-law, actress Marsha Hunt, Bing
was needed at the studio (presumably for the unfinished
The March of Time)
and panic ensued when he could not be located. He was traced back to Buster’s home in Coldwater Canyon, where he had attended
a party the previous evening, and was found under her bed, terrified of having to report for work. “He was so shy, so nervous,
that he was hiding out, or so the story went,” Marsha Hunt recalled. “But that elaborate, casual, laid-back style that he
was so famous for must have been a carefully drawn cover for great self-consciousness. Boy, what an act of grace and understatement
and charm.”
²¹

He was somewhat less than graceful in his marriage proposal, which Dixie recalled as a kind of self-improvement decision,
as though he’d taken to heart Saint Paul’s dictum to put away childish things and saw her as a means to a long-postponed maturity.
His brothers write in their biography that Bing told the other Rhythm Boys, “What I need is some responsibility, somebody
for me to look out for, and somebody to look out for me, and in spite of my depleted financial condition, I think I’ll take
the bull by the horns and get married.”
²²
Reminded of that passage by a reporter in 1946, Dixie said it was not far from the truth.

During the first weeks of their courtship, Dixie lived in the beach home of Mabel Cooper, a rehearsal pianist at Fox and a
few years her senior and very protective. Mabel’s son, child actor Jackie Cooper (his first film was
Fox Movietone Follies),
wrote of Bing’s constant hanging around, especially on weekends: “When I went outside those Sunday mornings, there would
be Bing Crosby, asleep on the front porch swing, in his tuxedo and shoes with a flower in his buttonhole. I would get him
a pillow and a blanket.”
²³
Bing was so infatuated with Dixie that he ventured to forewarn his mother. In early April, when
Bing had been seeing his future wife for three months and was set to leave on his last tour with Whiteman,
²⁴
he closed a letter to Kate: “Incidentally I met a girl the other night whom I think you’d like. Her name is Dixie Lee and
she works for Fox. Been taking her out quite a bit lately, and she’s kind of got me winging. Don’t get alarmed though, nothing
serious yet. Or maybe there is. Love. Harry.”
²⁵

The letter undoubtedly masked apprehension about bringing up women, or romance, with his mother. But there was another issue,
too. In considering marriage to Dixie, Bing was contemplating a step that, though taken by Kate herself, could only appall
her. The son she fancied as a priest was considering a marriage out of faith, into the religion to which his father had been
born. This cannot have been a casual decision, yet he did not insist that Dixie convert.

In the nine months between the beginning of their courtship and the day of their secretive wedding, Bing became increasingly
determined to support Dixie and avoid the burden of being known as Mr. Lee. Dixie was skeptical at first (she found him “spoiled
even then. He wore plus fours and yellow socks and hoped for a break in pictures”), but she soon succumbed.
²⁶
Although only eighteen, she displayed a nearly maternal dedication to his future. The cost was ruinous. In effect, she adopted
Kate’s role, taking Bing in hand, pushing him forward, mothering him — hardly an auspicious tack for conjugal bliss. Her belief
in Bing reassured and flattered him. But at twenty-seven, he continued to hold discipline at bay.

Bing’s final solo with Whiteman, recorded shortly before the last tour, was a song written for a Maurice Chevalier film that
Bing might have adapted as his slogan, “Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight”:

Things that bother you, they never bother me, I think everything’s fine,

Living in the sunlight, loving in the moonlight, having a wonderful time.

Just take it from me, I’m just as free as any dove.

I do what I like, just when I like, and how I love it.

I don’t give a hoot, give my cares the boot, all the world is in rhyme,

Living in the sunlight, loving in the moonlight, having a wonderful time.

With the Whiteman association over, the Rhythm Boys could hardly wait to return to California’s sunshine, though as Al conceded,
“The opportunities for performing and finding work were not as available as in New York.”
²⁷
Dixie, anxious to keep Bing in town, encouraged him as the group made the rounds. They found a brief stint on radio, and
then cooled their heels for a few weeks until a young agent, Leonard Goldstein, landed them a week’s work at $250 each on
a two-reeler, a last-ditch try by Pathe Exchange to skirt insolvency. The movie, a halfhearted burlesque of the hoariest of
melodramas, concerns a greedy landlord who threatens to evict an old man and his daughter into the cold. It was first conceived
as a showcase for Yiddish character actor Nat Carr. As the tailor in jeopardy, Carr is admired by the boys at Tait College
(a nod to
Good News),
who call him Ripstitch and spend their time playing ukeleles and shooting craps. The Rhythm Boys were to be included among
the college boys. On May 23, the day they made their last Columbia record (an amiable version of “A Bench in the Park”), a
script was submitted to producer Fred Guiol and director Ray McCarey for
Plus Eights,
a title they changed to
Two Plus Fours.

The most amusing aspect of Two
Plus Fours
is that the Rhythm Boy singled out for stardom by Ray McCarey (brother of Leo McCarey, who went on to create Bing’s Father
O’Malley pictures) was Harry Barris, on whom he ladled key lines, close-ups, and even the girl. Harry has pizzazz to spare,
but his collegiate wiseguy stuff was old hat even then. Al gets lost in the crowd while Bing seems inattentive and bored,
even at the end when he sings a solo verse of “The Stein Song” (a current Rudy Vallee hit), affects a dancer’s bearing from
the waist up, and then bops the landlord on the head while doing a comical entrechat with fluttery hands — mock-balletic poses
that would recur throughout his career. Shot in five days at a cost of more than $19,000, it previewed mid-June, shipped early
July, and disappeared, taking Pathe with it.