Bing Crosby (16 page)

On the one hand my friends and I would be hunting after the empty show of popularity —theatrical ap plause from the audience,
verse competitions, contests for crowns of straw, the vanity of the stage, immoderate lusts — and on the other hand we would
he trying to get clean of all this filth by carrying food to those people who were called the “elect” and the “holy ones.
“

— Saint Augustine,
Confessions
(c. 400)
¹

Rinker introduced himself and asked Bing whether he would be interested in trying out with a band at North Central: would
he like to bring his drums over to the Rinker home on West Mansfield for their next rehearsal? Bing unhesitatingly said yes.
The Dizzy Seven had faded away. Law was losing its attraction, and no one was bidding for his services as a musician. Spokane
had plenty of professional drummers playing in dance bands, and Bing was neither good enough nor experienced enough to join
the union and compete with them for work. The fact that he, a fourth-year college student, was asked to audition for a bunch
of high-school kids did not affront his ego in the slightest. He was game for anything.

Bing did not know Alton Rinker; and as far as Rinker knew, he did not know Bing. But as soon as he opened the door, Alt remembered
him. Alt and his brother Miles, who played alto saxophone in the group, had spent countless summer afternoons at the Mission
Park pool. “Every time we went swimming there,” Rinker wrote in an unpublished account of his association with Bing, “I would
see a young, blond-headed chubby boy, who was older than I. He could swim like a seal and was a good diver off the board.
He was well known at the pool and everyone called him Bing.”
²
Years had passed and Bing looked older, but he still carried himself with that impressive authority. As Alt introduced him
to Miles and the Pritchard brothers, Bob and Clare, he was struck by Bing’s composure and sharp sense of humor. After Bing
set up the drums and they ran down a few numbers, everyone was happy. “We knew right away that he really had a beat,” Rinker
recalled.
³
Bing exclaimed, “Oh boy, this is great!”
⁴

What was great was the experience of playing music that had some resemblance to the records everyone was listening to. Bob
Pritchard played C-melody saxophone, and his brother, Clarence, had a tenor banjo. None of them, including Rinker, could read
music, and the only keys they played in were A flat and E flat, which Alt had taught himself on piano: “I don’t know why,
but these were black keys and looked easier than the white keys.”
⁵
With his acute ear, however, he could adapt arrangements from records and assign appropriate notes to each musician. Among
the records they worked on were Paul Whiteman’s “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” “Whispering,” and “I Love You”; Ted Lewis’s
“When My Baby Smiles at Me”; the Mound City Blue Blowers’ “San”; the Cotton Pickers’ “Jimtown Blues”; and anything they could
find by the incredibly prolific Dixieland outfit the Original Memphis Five and Ukelele Ike.
⁶
Bing knew the records and had no trouble fitting in. He was so pleased with the group that he stood up from his drum seat
and announced he could sing, producing, to prove the point, a tiny blue-spangled megaphone. The boys were impressed. “Now
we had a good drummer who could also sing,” Rinker wrote, “and it really turned us all on.”
⁷

In fact, Bing wasn’t much of a drummer, and in later years whenever the subject came up, he liked to quote Phil Harris’s observation
that he had a roll wide enough to throw a dog through. He knew the rudiments and could keep time, but his skills as a percussionist
were just about equal to the musical talents of the other guys — which isn’t saying much. But they had enthusiasm to spare,
especially Alt
and Bing, who, unlike the others and unbeknownst to each other, were growing increasingly restless at school.

At first, Alt was concerned about how Bing would feel playing with high-school students. Rinker had just turned sixteen, and
Bing was coming up on twenty-one. But the age thing never came up. Perhaps Bing, who had always been a year younger than his
friends, liked being the eldest for a change. He established ground rules with Alton early. “I guess I was a little bossy
at rehearsals in the way I told the fellows what to play,” Rinker recalled. “I didn’t talk that way to Bing as he was the
drummer and didn’t play notes. But after one rehearsal, Bing came over to me and said, You’d better not talk that way to me
or I’ll give you a punch in the nose.’ It shook me up and from then on I was careful of how I talked to him at rehearsals.”
⁸

The influence of the Rinkers — first Alt and later his older sister, Mildred — on Bing’s career can scarcely be overstated.
His friendship with Alt dominated Bing’s life for nearly seven years, ultimately serving as the catalyst for his departure
from Spokane and his decision to pursue a life in show business. The association remained the central experience in Rinker’s
professional life, causing him some bitterness when the friendship died and he realized that despite his success as a radio
producer and composer, he would be remembered mainly as an appendage to the Crosby story. But in the beginning, Alton and
Bing needed each other. Rinker provided the energy and leadership necessary to spur his pal along. Bing offered Rinker companionship
and an entrée to his own clique of college boys, filling a need left by the death of Alt’s mother years before and a temporary
abandonment by his father. Bing even renamed him, insistently calling him Al, instead of Alt (rhymes with
vault).
Pretty soon Al’s friends and family followed suit. Though the relationship ended badly, it is impossible to read the unpublished
memoir Al wrote shortly before his death without perceiving an unrequited admiration. On the surface, the young men appeared
to be two branches off the same tree.

Al was born on December 20, 1907, the third of four children, on a thousand-acre wheat farm sixty miles from Spokane, across
the Idaho state line. His mother, Josephine, was half Cour d’Alene Indian, and since the farm was on the reservation, the
land had been deeded to her tax-free. The eldest of Al’s siblings was his sister, Mildred, a skillful bareback rider who rode
five miles to school every morning on a
buckskin pony with their brother Miles clinging to her waist. In the 1930s she would be celebrated as the “Rockin’ Chair Lady,”
for her record of the Hoagy Carmichael song “Rockin’ Chair,” and would become almost as well known for her weight as for her
swinging birdlike voice. Yet Mildred was a slip of a girl, barely five feet tall; until she was twenty, she weighed less than
a hundred pounds. Like the Crosby place, the Rinker home echoed with music. Their father, Charles, played fiddle and called
square dances at the community’s occasional socials. His wife, Josephine, a devout Catholic who had studied music with the
nuns at Tekoa, was a pianist who played by ear — classics, opera songs, and ragtime, including a favorite of Al’s she called
“Dill Pickles.” During the years when the children were young, she sat down at the piano every evening after supper and taught
Mildred to play and sing. Al recalled that Mildred favored songs of longing and exotic places, like “Siren of the Southern
Seas,” “Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight,” “Araby.”

When Al was five, Charles hired a tenant to run the farm and moved his family to a house on Spokane’s North Side, where he
operated an auto-supply shop. Four years later Josephine succumbed to tuberculosis. The distraught widower with four children
(including the baby, Charles Jr.) hired and soon married an abusive housekeeper named Mrs. Pierce. “I think he had lost his
mind,” Alwrote. “Compared to her, the wicked stepmother in Grimms’ Fairy Tales was a fairy godmother.”
⁹
Mildred loathed her, and at seventeen she packed a bag, kissed her brothers and bid them and her father good-bye, and left
for Seattle, where she stayed with an aunt while working as a sheet-music demonstrator at Woolworth’s. She quickly married
and divorced Ted Bailey, electing to retain his name because she thought it sounded more American than the Swiss-derived Rinker.
As Prohibition went into effect, she began to sing in speakeasies in Seattle and Canada, where she met and married Benny Stafford,
a bootlegger.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Pierce issued an ultimatum: Mr. Rinker would have to choose either her and her daughter or his own children.
“He must have been under a spell,” Al wrote, “because he finally sent us to the Catholic Academy in Tekoa, Washington.”
¹⁰
The boys were miserable, but whenever their father brought them home, Mrs. Pierce would force him to send them away again.
On one occasion when she beat him with a broom, Al hauled off and punched her in the
stomach. After that, she agreed to a compromise: Al and Miles were permitted to enroll as boarders at Gonzaga High School.
Al began studying piano and found he could pick out tunes by ear and fit appropriate chords to the melody lines — at least
if they were in A flat and E flat. Charles Rinker finally shed himself of the wicked stepmother and her daughter, settling
a lot of money on them in the process, at which point Alton and Miles returned home and transferred to North Central High.

Even Mildred briefly returned to Spokane, to sing at Charlie Dale’s speakeasy. Alton was too young to see her work there,
but she enthusiastically shared with him her collection of records by an exciting new singer, Ethel Waters.
¹¹
Bing apparently did hear Mildred at Dales, though his recollection of her as “the area’s outstanding singing star” was a
substantial exaggeration. She appeared locally only once and was little noted; speakeasies were not reviewed. “She specialized
in sultry, throaty renditions with a high concentrate of Southern accent, such as ‘Louisville Lou’ and ‘Hard-Hearted Hannah,’”
Bing wrote.
¹²
She remembered him, too, and in 1941 recalled his early years. “Bing was always a fella to get into trouble,” she said. “I
expect he spent every Saturday night of his life in jail. But look at him now. For my money, he’s the best of them all, male
or female.”
¹³

Bob and Clare Pritchard were living with their aunt and uncle, not far from the Rinkers, when they decided they wanted to
play music. For Christmas 1922, they received instruments — a C-melody saxophone and tenor banjo — and practiced constantly
with Al and Miles, as Al worked up arrangements. After six months they knew six tunes. They drafted Fred Healy on drums, and
auditioned him on “Wabash Blues.” He sounded okay, but within a few months the Rinkers and Pritchards had improved, while
Healy “couldn’t keep a good beat on his drums.”
¹⁴
They broke the news to him and looked elsewhere. Now, with Bing in the group and Miles doubling on clarinet, they rehearsed
at Al’s house and played a few high-school dances for money. A student at North Central, Jimmy Heaton, asked if he could play
trumpet in the band. Unlike the others, Heaton was an excellent, schooled player; he was the first of the bunch to make a
mark in Hollywood, as an ace studio musician. (He played lead trumpet for Alfred Newman on countless 20th Century-Fox scores.)

Heaton gave the small ensemble a brassy spark, encouraging Al to fashion more intricate arrangements. They called themselves
the Musicaladers (as in “musical aiders”) and played social gatherings at Odd Fellows Hall, the Elks Club, and the Manito
Park Social Club, often with Rinker billed as leader. The Manito job, three dollars a man, was on a Sunday night, and Bing
could barely suppress his yawning in law class the next day. His interest in school was fading.

Early in 1924 the band was given a week on the small stage at the Casino Theater and went over well enough to get a repeat
engagement. They rented tuxedo jackets and white flannel trousers and thought themselves pros. Bing periodically made his
way from the drums to the proscenium to sing such songs as “Alice Blue Gown,” “Margie,” “St. Louis Blues,” and “For Me and
My Gal.” Al’s arrangements, adapted from the latest discs, were invariably up-to-date. “Well, he was very good,” Bing said
late in life:

He had a great ear for music, he could play pretty near anything after he heard it a time or two, and play the right harmony,
too. He’d pick out a part for each instrument. We had piano, banjo, cornet, clarinet, saxophone, and he’d voice all the harmonies
for them, just show them the harmonic line to follow, and we’d be playing the same arrangement as on the record. We were quite
a novelty around Spokane ’cause we would have arrangements taken from hit records, which we could play. That really made us
unique.
¹⁵

The Musicaladers would take any job, anyplace. “We were nonunion,” Bing said. “We had no scale, no minimum, no maximum —whatever
we could get. It wasn’t much, but you didn’t need much in those days.”
¹⁶
One engagement they kept secret was at a second-story Chinese restaurant, the Pekin Cafe, a popular if notorious hangout
that trafficked in liquor and prostitution. The Pekin offered the Musicaladers a regular job every Friday and Saturday night
for good money. “I was able to allay some of my mother’s doubts about the restaurant’s respectability by pointing to its most
respectable financial rewards,” Bing recalled.
¹⁷

The fact that Bing was drinking heavily and not always holding it well became obvious one afternoon when he and his friend
Edgie Hogle, who tried to manage the Musicaladers, got into trouble. Bing, who had been at Colonel Albert’s office, walked
over to Hat Freeman’s
hat store, where Edgie clerked. Each put up fifty cents, and Bing walked to an alley a block away where a bootlegger sold
dollar pints of popskull, a pernicious moonshine whiskey. Later, back at Hat’s and properly tanked, Bing and Edgie mulled
over a vaudeville act they’d seen the previous evening in which a juggler cast hats over the heads of the audience and made
them return like boomerangs. By the time the owner returned, four straw hats had sailed out the door. He fired Edgie and banned
Bing from the premises.