Bing Crosby (76 page)

Cocooning himself in technology at the same time he gamboled at sporting events and other public occasions, Bing was magically
everywhere and nowhere, a perfect candidate for the ministrations of publicists charged with the assignment of riffing at
length on what everybody already knew. The Bing that Paramount’s publicity office spoon-fed the media was, overall, close
enough to the truth to give all involved a clean conscience. The releases were written in a simple, mirthful, self-satisfied
style that reinvented this most willfully independent of men as a blend of Tom Sawyer, Ragged Dick, Abe Lincoln, and Will
Rogers — untouchably appealing, not unlike the folkloric hero of Roaring Lion’s calypso.
³

It has been written that the old studio demagogues spied on their screenwriters, listening for the sound of typing to make
certain no one was dawdling. If they didn’t bother checking the cubicles where their public-relations men worked, it was because
a cluster of busier writers never lived. Day after day, studio publicists hammered out reams of copy about the company’s principal
assets, its stars, much of it laughably untrue. Who had time to check facts? And what star wanted to be pestered by facts?
Actors with made-up names and made-up biographies were content to let the studio’s press office reinvent them as it pleased.

The fictionalizing was often essential. The faintest whiff of moral turpitude could be ruinous, grounds to break a contract,
although exceptions were made for stars who shone brightly at the box office. In the event of a problem too big for the publicists
to hide, a patsy might have to take a fall. Hirelings could always be found to accept
the blame for reckless accidents or acquiesce to sham marriages. Most stars, however, required no cover beyond the blizzard
of press releases that found their way, virtually unchanged, into newspapers and magazines.

The power and arrogance of publicists was no secret. Hollywood lampooned them mercilessly, invariably portraying them as unscrupulous,
ruthless, alcoholic, and utterly indifferent to the desires of the lost souls consigned to their unctuous hands. Onscreen,
Lee Tracy (once cited by Bing as a favorite film actor) incarnated the role in
Bombshell;
Lionel Stander made it nastier in A
Star Is Born.
In Bing’s
She Loves Me Not
the press flack is sleazier than the murderers. But the contempt of their associates by no means diminished the press agents’
hold on the public’s credulity. They were abetted by entertainment editors who cheerfully accommodated them, sometimes appending
a reporter’s byline to a standard press release. Since Bing’s providential life made for a most seductive serial, Paramount
flacks were obliged constantly to rehash it — spinning their own variations. Bing was of little help to them. He shunned invasions
of his personal life.

He faced a Jesuitical conundrum: how to remain one of the sheep when everyone persists in treating you like the shepherd;
how to keep that unruly mistress fame in her place. Success was a beautiful stranger who compromises a perfect evening by
demanding unqualified love. Bing recognized that fans who loved him and expected the same in return were best handled from
a distance. Yet even as he resisted public appearances, he assiduously responded to admirers, one at a time. As early as Cremo
he made a point of answering his mail, dictating brief and businesslike responses. Several of his fan correspondences went
on for years, leading to encounters and friendships. He was godfather to the child of at least one longtime letter writer.
⁴

He blew hot and cold in the same way with colleagues. “Out here, all people want to do is to party and socialize,” he told
Cork O’Keefe in the late 1930s. “It got so I’d meet someone on the set for the first time, and next thing they’d be standing
on my doorstep with a bunch of friends, expecting to be invited in and entertained. So my home’s off-limits to everyone.”
⁵
Yet his loyalties were absolute. “If you were his friend, he was a friend till the end,” insisted Gary Stevens. “Look
at all the song publishers he practically supported, like Rocco Vocco.”
⁶
Vocco had befriended Bing in the Whiteman era, on occasion putting him to bed after a night’s carousing; he could always
call on Bing and ask him to debut a song on
KMH.
Bing was accessible; he answered his own phone. What he did not do very often was entertain guests — especially after 1939.

It was different in the mid-thirties, when Dixie occasionally instigated parties, though she, too, had second thoughts. After
the night Joe Venuti came to dinner, she encouraged Bing to entertain his more colorful friends away from home. She had just
purchased dining-room chairs with wood-framed wicker backs. Several drinks into the evening, Joe bet Bing he could butt his
head through the wicker. Bing anted up, double or nothing, until Joe destroyed every chair, convulsing Bing and enraging Dixie,
who banished them to the veranda till morning.

A more serious reason for keeping the world at bay was the fear of kidnappers, magnified by the police, who first warned the
Crosbys of a plot before Gary was a year old. Three days after he had been cautioned, Bing obtained a permit to carry a gun,
as did Ev; they were sworn in as deputy sheriffs. The publicity turned sour two years later when Bing was stopped for speeding,
and the traffic cop noticed his revolver. Bing had forgotten the permit and had to explain himself at the Hollywood police
station before he was allowed to continue on to Paramount. He began to realize that some threats were nothing more than unfounded
rumors generated by publicity-seekers among the police or at the FBI. Yet if his sons were never endangered, they were nonetheless
victimized. Obsessed with their safety, Bing hired bodyguards and imposed strict curfews. His attempt to raise them as regular
kids was undermined by his constraining protectiveness.

Every few months, before a new Crosby film premiered, the newspapers and fan magazines published interviews, stories, even
articles by Bing himself. Almost all were drawn from publicity releases. The result was fairly astonishing: the illusion that
Bing was ubiquitous and approachable, when in fact he was harder to pin down for an interview than perhaps any other star
of his stature. He was so pervasive on records and radio that his fans seemed not to notice his long absence from the stage.
Bing liked to explain his aversion to live
performance by insisting he was not a great entertainer, like Jolson or Fields. All his life, no matter how high his star
rose, a part of him remained a fan with his nose pressed against the glass of the very business he ruled. The surest way to
get his cold shoulder was to approach him with starry eyes.

The publicity assault had begun early.
College Humor
had just opened and
Too Much Harmony
was before the cameras when the studio issued its five-page opus, “The Life Story of Bing Crosby Written by Himself.”
⁷
The best that can be said of the effort is that it reverses the venerable literary tradition in which fictional characters
— from Robinson Crusoe to Huckleberry Finn — are made to seem real; here, without any morsal of literary distinction, a real
person is made to seem fictional. “I love to sing,” it commences, “and I can thank my lucky stars that other people like to
hear me!” It gets worse, hitting notes that resonated for many years: “I’m one of those old-time bathroom baritones (since
dignified by the title ‘Crooner’) and, in or out of the bathtub, Brother, I sing!”

Bing’s days as a scalawag were recent enough to require acknowledgment: “I don’t think a crazier guy ever lived than the Bing
Crosby who sang at the Cocoanut Grove. Irresponsible? Say, I was so busy having a good time that I didn’t know what responsibility
was.” Nor could the growth on his vocal cords be ignored, although he claims not to understand (“Honestly!”) the “husky quaver”
it yields. He calls Russ Columbo “a grand entertainer” and says they used to imitate each other (that one must have nettled
Bing when he read it). In the “gay dog” days, he says, he broke contracts “without realizing what I was doing and without
meaning to harm anyone intentionally.”
⁸
Excerpted or whole, this stuff was widely published.

The mock Bing concedes he can’t tell some things, so he asks Dixie Lee — “the wife, who has been putting up with me for a
long time” — to continue. She also sighs a few enduring ditties, adding to a portrait of likable incorrigibility. His clothes:
he “always looks as though he’s been pulled out of the scrap bag.” His innocence: “Bing is the most naive person in the world
except Dick Arlen.” His shyness: “When he was courting me, he was tongue-tied most of the time — like an awestruck little
boy.” His modesty: “He claims to be the laziest man in the world — and yet he works his head off.” His willfulness: “We were
having a party one night. At ten, Bing got up from his chair,
said, ‘Good night, have a good time.’ With an admonition to me to carry on, he went to bed.” His genuineness: “Today he’s
quite the same sort of person that he appears in the films — perhaps that’s why he’s so popular!”
⁹

Rarely did Bing take the trouble to correct errors Paramount promulgated, as he did with the 1934 press release that insisted
his son was “not named after Gary Cooper. Bing and Dixie just liked the name” or the canard that found him “shouting ‘bing’
louder than any kid in the neighborhood while playing cowboy in Washington.”
¹⁰
It was usually too late. If one cycle of newspapers circulated a tale, the next repeated it. NBC distributed a biographical
three-pager in the summer of 1939, in which nearly every line conveys misinformation.
¹¹
Paramount releases made the malarkey more credible with touches of veracity — the weird clothing, whistling, fishing, self-deprecation,
golf, pipe smoking. Some handouts were deemed so effective that the studio recycled them. The one that began “I love to sing”
was updated with the title, “Some Sad Words Set to Gay Music,” adding a paragraph about his recent pictures while omitting
the passages about Russ Columbo, the husky quaver, and Dixie’s observations. It ends: “I seem to be headed for success and
I’m glad that it has come to me at this time, when I am no longer a gay dog, but a business man with a frog in his throat.”
¹²

By 1935 Crosby press releases had grown more subtle, less exclamatory. The gurus most responsible for the fabricated Bing
were publicity men Ralph Huston and Dave Keene, who worked under Huston and often adopted Bing’s byline. “Say It with Music:
Bing Crosby’s Life Story as Told to Dave Keene”
¹³
was initially written in the third person (“If Bing Crosby hadn’t once tried to earn himself a few dollars by working as
a lumberman…”),
¹⁴
then adapted as a memoir (“If I hadn’t once tried to earn a few bucks for myself by being a lumberman…”). In yet another
draft Keene took a completely new tack, beginning, “The most important thing in any man’s life is a woman. I’ve been favored
above most men….”
¹⁵
It continues with hymns in praise of Bing’s mother, Mildred Bailey, Dixie, and Broadway comedienne Elsie Janis, who, the
release claims, was the most important woman in Bing’s life after mother and wife because she prodded him to leave the Rhythm
Boys — although “Barris was really the outstanding singer of the bunch. Al and I just made up the
harmony.”
¹⁶
(Bing may have known Janis, but he never publicly spoke of her.)
¹⁷
Keene’s chronicle, a dozen pages parsed into five chapters, even revamped Bing’s ancestors, making them Indian fighters as
well as sea captains. Bing’s dad was handsomely promoted: “Old Harry had a pickle factory.”

By 1936 most of the elements in the Crosby legend were locked into place and references to his life as a gay dog disappeared.
It is impossible not to love the character stitched together in Paramount’s press office — generous, naive, humorous, happy,
modest, unpretentious, pleasingly eccentric, devoted to family, bemused by good fortune. “Screen success hasn’t altered his
care-free good nature, his carelessness, nor his innate laziness,” Ralph Huston enthused. “The only thing Bing resents is
invasion of the privacy of his home. In public, he is perfectly willing to be a public figure. At home, like Garbo, he ‘wants
to be alone.’”
¹⁸

By 1938 the releases were filled with tales of golf and the track and of his investments. For a few years he took a strong
interest in prizefighting, buying the contract of heavyweight Georgie Turner and, more successfully, a half interest in Tacoma’s
Freddie Steele, who fought his way to middleweight champion. Turning his attention to another kind of boxer, he paid $1,500
for Gunda of Barmere (Bing renamed her Venus), whose stock inspired him to dabble in a commercial breeding kennel and enter
his dogs in shows. His other investments included real estate and oil wells; an all-girl baseball team, the Croonerettes;
Canadian gold mines; a majority share of Select Music Publishing Co.; and an actor’s agency with a chancy roster: actresses
Mary Carlisle and Genevieve Tobin, soprano Josephine Tuminia, songwriters John Burke and Arthur Johnston, and Dixie. His diverse
interests were managed by Bing Crosby, Inc., the “very legal and secure” (as a finicky Paramount flack put it)
¹⁹
family-run business created as an umbrella for his ever growing assets. Bing was president, Everett and Larry chief officers,
and old Harry the bookkeeper of record.

Much was made of Bing’s refusal to accept star billing, his insistence on crediting his success to luck and “swell friends”
²⁰
(“as for acting, Bing doesn’t know the meaning of the word”),
²¹
his imperturbable “naturalness and nonchalance.”
²²
He was often coupled with Eddie Cantor as one of Hollywood’s proudest fathers. Not all
Paramount flacks read each other’s copy, though; as late as 1938 a newcomer wrote, “There’s no romance how he happened to
become ‘Bing.’ He just shouted ‘Bing! Bing!’ louder and oftener than the other kids who played cops and robbers.”
²³