Bing Crosby (26 page)

The day after the session,
Variety
ran an item on the boys’ extraordinary new contract with Whiteman, to begin “in Chicago in the Publix houses.”
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Weeks later the
Spokane Chronicle
reported that “they made a number of Columbia phonograph records,”
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along with other ballyhoo that suggested a boneheaded attempt at public relations, probably by Everett. Not surprisingly,
“I’ve Got the Girl!” promptly disappeared. Bing never spoke of it, and it lay unknown to avid Crosby collectors until 1951,
when Ed Mello and Tom McBride published the first Crosby discography and failed to include it. After showing it to Bing, Larry
Crosby wrote Mello, “Bing is well pleased.”
But he pointed out that Bing told him his first record was with Don Clark’s orchestra “in 1926 or 1927 for Columbia — he thinks
with Al Rinker. Do you have any record on this?”
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A year later a collector in San Francisco found a copy. Larry’s doubt about Rinker was not shared by Bing, who recalled their
duet well enough to sing a few measures for interviewers as late as 1976.

They finished at the Metropolitan with
Joy Week
on October 28, and two days later hit San Francisco to fulfill their debt to Partington. Before leaving, they sold their
Dodge, and Mildred gave them a farewell party. Partington’s revues rotated weekly —
Dancing Around, Jazz a la Carte, Way Down South.
In the cast of the first two was Peggy Bernier, on whom Bing developed a crush that would later blossom into a woozy affair.
But Bing and Al spent most of their time in San Francisco playing golf on the public links and — eager to impress Whiteman
— working up new songs. During their final days with the company, they were preoccupied with the problem of filling a two-week
interval before heading for Chicago. They may not have noticed the quiet revolution taking place in American entertainment:
NBC had just launched the first radio network. The boys decided that after ending their run in
Way Down South,
they would visit Spokane. They made calls to line up a job. Within days the
Spokane Chronicle
trumpeted their return and a “big production” scheduled for the Liberty Theater.
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Their reception at the Northern Pacific depot was a modest rendition of
Hail the Conquering Hero,
with a clamoring retinue of family and friends. Al’s family had relocated to Los Angeles, so they stayed at Bing’s home.
Kate pointed out that her son had gained weight. Surrounded by neighbors on the Crosby porch, Bing sat a four-year-old named
Mary Lou Higgins on his lap and sang “Mary Lou.” She began sobbing uncontrollably.
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The prodigal sons palled around with the gang, squired women, played golf at Downriver Park, and did four shows daily. Ray
Grombacher, who operated the Liberty — and the adjoining music shop that had been Al and Bing’s graduate school — hired them
for five days at the fancy price of $350. They opened at 11:00
P.M
.on the evening before Thanksgiving, opposite a popular Paramount comedy,
We’re in the Navy Now,
starring Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton. That night their old stomping ground, the
Clemmer Theater, made do with
Stella Dallas
and no live acts. The Liberty’s newspaper ads emphasized the movie but added: “And then just to make it the best show in
town Ray A. Grombacher presents Bing Crosby & Al Rinker in their own original novelty.”
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The ad included pictures of the pair in matching jackets and bow ties, along with their billing, “Two Boys with a Piano and
a Voice.”

“We were both a little nervous,” Al remembered. “It was a lot different playing to all of our hometown friends.”
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But after the first show, the nervousness disappeared. They headlined in a “six-act pot-pourri”
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at the “midnight matinee”
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and went over big. The
Spokesman-Review
reported “songs and songalogues last night, with Rinker at the ‘ivories’; Crosby lent the jazz touch to the act by playing
a solo on cymbals. The big crowd went wild over their mixture of harmony and comedy.”
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The
Chronicle
further mythologized their flivver (comparing it to Elijah’s “flaming chariot”) and their ascendancy “to affluence in the
song world,” and noted their impending departure for “Gotham’s high-priced whirl.”
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No mention was made of the coming tour of Chicago and the Midwest. The big news was that they would appear on Broadway in
a Charles Dillingham production.

“It isn’t what the boys do, but the way they do it,” one reporter concluded, citing Bing’s “timely crashes on a diminutive
cymbal.”
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For five days they performed at three, six, seven, and nine. Grombacher boasted that on the first day alone, 9,000 people
saw the show and another 1,500 were turned away. At last he was compensated for the records Bing and Al did not buy at Bailey’s.
Yet for Bing the memory of their visit was compromised: “Somebody sneaked into our dressing room and stole our money while
we were on stage, a heinous thing to do to a fellow in his home town,” he recalled.
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They were able to earn some of it back with a show in the Italian Gardens of the Davenport Hotel, but they were not sorry
to leave town. Bing’s family and friends cheered and wished them luck as the boys boarded the Great Northern to join Paul
Whiteman’s band, the most famous in the world. Spokane did not lay eyes on Bing again for eleven years.

The train was three days getting to Chicago. Relying on a friend’s recommendation, they taxied to the Eastgate Hotel on Michigan
Avenue. (“This time we checked in double,” Al recalled, referring
to their old dodge of going two for one.)
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Whiteman was booked for three weeks in Chicago, a different theater each week. He closed at the Chicago Theater on the Saturday
the boys arrived, and would hit the Tivoli — with Bing and Al — on Monday. On their last day to themselves, Bing and Al toured
the city, learning the ways of the elevated train, which they would be using to get to the theater on the South Side. Bing
attended a football game. His old friend Ray Flaherty was in town, playing with the New York Yankees, and Bing sat on the
bench. They went out afterward for drinks and dinner, and Bing told Ray that there would be a pass in his name at the Tivoli.

Monday morning — December 6, 1926 — they packed blazers and got to the theater as the bandstand was set up. Whiteman arrived
at noon, delighted to find them waiting: “Well, I see you made it, and right on time.”
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He introduced them to the musicians (“They seemed very pleased to have us with them,” Al recalled) but asked Bing and Al
to sit out the two afternoon shows, to get a feel for the production from backstage. The show dazzled them as much as it had
in Los Angeles. By evening they were nervous but raring to go. Whiteman gave them a pep talk and went to work. Al described
their initiation:

The first evening show was about to start and we were all made-up and ready. There was a full house out front. Whiteman told
us that we would go on about the middle of the show and that he would introduce us as Crosby and Rinker, who were making their
first appearance with his band. Well, our turn finally came and Paul walked out and started our introduction. What he said
was far different than what we had expected. He told the audience that he had heard two young boys singing in an ice cream
parlor in a little town out west, called Walla Walla. “They sang some songs and I wondered what they were doing in Walla Walla.
These kids were good, too good for Walla Walla, so I asked them to join my band. This is their first appearance with the band
and here they are. I want you to meet Crosby and Rinker. Come on out boys.” The little piano was moved on stage and Bing and
I came out from the wings. All I know is that we got a big hand after our first song and even more applause on our second
number. To top it all, we were called back for an encore. That was our first appearance on the big time. You can bet we were
two happy guys. Whiteman came over
to us after the show and said, “Well, how do you feel? I knew they’d like you. Welcome to the band!”
²⁹

Whiteman’s introduction established a receptive mood in the audience but failed to impress the names of his recruits on a
Chicago Daily News
reporter, who referred to them as Bing Rinker and Bill Crosby.
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A small incident after the show presaged Crosby’s immense impact on popular music. One of the three songs he and Al performed
was “In a Little Spanish Town,” a nervy choice considering they had originally nabbed it from Whiteman and his trombonist-singer
Jack Fulton, who sang it at the Million Dollar Theater. Before they left for the hotel, Whiteman notified Fulton that the
song would now be done by the new boys. Fulton was irate and let everyone know it. Al felt guilty and half a century later
took pains to justify himself. He told a Crosby biographer that he and Bing did not realize it was Fulton’s number; he wrote
in his memoir that Whiteman forced it on them. (In fact, Whiteman allowed them to choose their own songs.) Perhaps Bing also
felt pangs — he did not record it for nearly thirty years.

Jack Fulton, however, had recorded it with Whiteman three months earlier, and his version was just then reaching the stores.
By Christmas it was the biggest record in the country. Whiteman had no choice but to return it to the man who made it nationally
famous. Yet Paul’s switcheroo served as a warning to those present: the effeminate, semifalsetto style typified by Fulton
and the other musician-singers was not long for this world.
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Bing’s stay in Chicago was eventful for other reasons, too. After Whiteman completed his week at the Uptown Theater, he reserved
the cavernous Orchestra Hall for two days of recording, on December 21 and 22. The first produced three acceptable instrumentals.
The second was less productive. “Bunch of Happiness,” a feature for the band’s high-voiced trio — Fulton, Young, and Gaylord
— was deemed unsatisfactory and shelved. The same fate befell “Pretty Lips,” a Walter Donaldson tune designed to introduce
Crosby and Rinker. Though four takes failed to jell, the arrangement showed enough promise to warrant another try at a later
date. The session’s only acceptable number was a rendition of Ruth Etting’s “Wistful and Blue.” Coupled with an instrumental
from the day before, it was the
first of nearly one hundred titles Bing and Al recorded under White-man’s aegis. Dated as it is today, their record debut
was novel in 1926.

Max Farley, a Whiteman saxophonist, arranged “Wistful and Blue” ‘s odd eighteen-bar theme for the orchestra, but the vocal
chorus was treated separately; the singers were backed by viola, guitar, and bass. Matty Malneck, waiting for this kind of
opportunity, arranged the vocal passage, using his viola as a third voice in unison with Bing and Al. With Wilbur Hall strumming
guitar and John Sperzel keeping a yeoman beat on bass, they sing a straight chorus with a two-bar break, followed by a stop-time
scat chorus that evolves into a chase between voices and viola. Rinker’s voice dominates the duet, but it was the general
jazziness of the vocal interlude — not the individual talents of the singers — that made the record a turning point for Whiteman;
this zesty brand of singing was unknown to most of his public. Bing credited Malneck’s arrangement with helping him and Al
forge “a new style… a vocal without words.”
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To hip musicians in Chicago, however, scat had been the rage for months. Bing and some of the other adventurous musicians
in Whiteman’s band heard it that very week from the master himself, Louis Armstrong. If mobster Al Capone ruled the city,
Armstrong ruled its music. Whatever he played was instantly picked up by other musicians. The previous spring OKeh issued
his Hot Five recording of “Heebie Jeebies,” and it caused a sensation, selling some 40,000 copies thanks to his inspired vocal
chorus — a torrent of bristling grunts and groans in no known language. Pianist Earl Hines later claimed he knew musicians
who tried to catch cold so they could growl like Louis; and Mezz Mezzrow, the marijuana-pushing clarinetist, recalled, “You
would hear cats greeting each other with Louis’s riffs when they met around town… scatting in each other’s face.”
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Before Louis, scat singing could be heard on records by Cliff Edwards (Ukelele Ike) and Red McKenzie (Mound City Blue Blowers);
Bing and Al had admired and imitated them in Spokane. But the ad libs on those records were often disguised by kazoo or comb.
They had little of Armstrong’s rhythmic thrust and none of his melodic ingenuity.

At the time Whiteman pulled into town, Louis was fronting the Sunset Cafe band, with Hines as his musical director. The place
was run by Joe Glaser, a Capone acolyte who several years later would
become Armstrong’s manager, building the powerful Associated Booking Agency in the process. In Chicago he billed his star
in lights as “The World’s Greatest Trumpet Player.” The Sunset was located on the main stem of black Chicago but served an
integrated audience. Because its band played a good two hours after most others retired, the club became a second home to
many of the best white musicians in town, among them Bix Beiderbecke, Hoagy Carmichael, Tommy Dorsey, and Frank Trumbauer.

Whiteman introduced Bing and Al to the Sunset and other hot spots in Chicago. One can only imagine Bing’s initial response
to Louis’s irrepressible genius, especially if Mildred Bailey had primed him for an experience bordering on the Second Coming.
All his life Bing surrounded himself with people who made him laugh. In Armstrong, music and humor were inseparable. Bing
was bowled over one evening when Louis revived a routine he had developed in New York in 1924, putting on a frock coat and
dark glasses and preaching as the Reverend Satchelmouth. The Gonzagan found Armstrong’s irreverence almost as revelatory as
his music. He had a front-row pew and knew exactly what he was hearing. When asked in 1950 who had influenced him most, Bing
replied, “I’m proud to acknowledge my debt to the Reverend Satchelmouth. He is the beginning and the end of music in America.
And long may he reign.”
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