Bing Crosby (80 page)

After mass, at a commencement (rather than on the air), Bing received his degree. The statement written by Sharp and read
by Robinson took note of Bing’s technological handmaidens: “two of the greatest scientific achievements of the age, the radio
and the cinema,” whereby “the voice and personality of Harry Lillis Crosby have brought pleasure and many a happy moment to
millions of his fellow men.” It went on to praise his “steadfast loyalty and unswerving fidelity to his Alma Mater and his
firm adherence to the principles of uprightness and moral courage taught by the University he attended.”
¹⁰
Bing later recalled, “I almost broke down.”
¹¹

From Gonzaga they trouped to City Hall, where Bing was named honorary mayor and Burns honorary chief of police. The
KMH
show and banquet followed that night. Thousands attended the various events, including the talent contest at the Fox Theatre,
where the queuing began at 2:00 for a 9:30 curtain. Bing and Burns left the banquet to make a brief appearance at the Fox
and return with the
winners, chosen by Ted Lesser and James Moore, the head of Para-mount’s talent department and the studio’s chief test director,
respectively. Preliminary events reduced the field of a thousand contestants to a group of ten. Lesser assigned parts to the
actors, and Moore filmed them, in case, Lesser observed, “talent develops that we can use outside of the winners.”
¹²
As it happened, he found talent outside the circle of finalists. An attractive blonde named Barbara Ruth Rogers caught his
eye selling tickets at a theater. Surprised but pleased by her good luck, she told a reporter, “I never thought much about
pictures, but probably had the thought in the back of my head.”
¹³
Paramount signed her along with one contest winner, Janet Waldo, to two-year contracts; they appeared in numerous movies
over the next twenty-four months, before the bubble burst, first as walk-ons, then in supporting roles, and finally as leads
in Poverty Row westerns. Waldo went on to enjoy a long and prominent radio career.

Perhaps Bing was contemplating the likely future of young contract players or recalling his own futile auditions, because
he was said to appear nervous at the show, furiously smoking his pipe and relieved to pass the mike to Bob Burns, who passed
it to Carpenter, the evening’s emcee. He was radiant, however, the next night at the Armory, presiding at a two-and-a-half-hour
show before an elated audience of 3,500 — and in a tuxedo! When Carpenter introduced him, he brought down the house addressing
the crowd as “fellow citizens.” He continued, “You shouldn’t thank me for coming here. Rather, I should thank you most sincerely
for what you have done for me and for the honor which Gonzaga University has bestowed upon me. We came here to do something
for Gonzaga and Spokane.”
¹⁴
The highlight of the show was his duet with Connie Boswell on “Basin Street Blues.”

Bing could do no wrong that week. In addition to raising more than $10,000 for the Gonzaga Athletic Fund, he presented the
team with a $1,000 water wagon to replace paper cups carried around at halftime on a tray. (They lost anyway.) He visited
a “home for unfortunate girls,”
¹⁵
called the House of the Good Shepherd, where he dedicated tennis courts, signed autographs, crooned a cappella, and executed
a buck and wing. At the Shrine Children’s Hospital, he walked among the beds with ready wit, talking and singing to one child
after another — “My Little Buckaroo” to the smallest boy in the group,
“Sweet Leilani” to a girl in a head-to-foot cast with only her eyes showing. He staged an impromptu performance for the student
priests at Mount St. Michael. He visited Inland Products, the former brewery that had brought the Crosbys east from Tacoma,
and other haunts of his youth. On October 25 Bing boarded the train for Los Angeles. At a stop in Klamath Falls, Oregon, he
was greeted by a crowd of 2,000. Call him lucky: the next day he abandoned the train in Oakland to attend the races at San
Mateo. His horse High Strike won the Home Bred Handicap.

The four days cost Bing the substantial sum of $5,000. The headliners came out of friendship, but Trotter’s band left five
network shows without their regular musicians, and substitutes had to be paid, as did extra wire charges for broadcasting
from Spokane. From a public-relations angle, it was a bargain; the national publicity was so upbeat, it started a wave of
great-guy stories that all but washed away the drunk sailors, taxes, picket line, Mysterious Montague, and familial rancor.
Three years earlier the
Los Angeles Examiner
had deemed him a “guardian angel” for seeing Mack Sennett through a period of financial hardship.
¹⁶
That kind of news item now became commonplace. In fact, within days of his return to Paramount, Bing was declared a lifesaver
by makeup man Wylann Fieltz, whom Bing came upon unconscious in his dressing room and rushed to a hospital for an emergency
appendectomy.

Bing’s good deeds often concerned friends in the jazz world. In May 1937 he organized a five-hour benefit for the tubercular
pianist Joe Sullivan at Pan-Pacific Auditorium. The 6,000 who attended and the tens of thousands who listened on the radio
heard one of the Swing Era’s benchmark evenings. Bing instructed Everett and Larry to produce the best swing concert ever,
and the performers included Bing, Connie Boswell, Red Norvo, Johnny Mercer, Ella Logan, the guitar duo of Dick McDonough and
Carl Kress, and the orchestras of Woody Herman, Earl Hines, Ray Noble, Jimmy Dorsey, Louis Prima, Harry Owens, Jimmy Grier,
Victor Young, and Ben Pollack. It broke the house record and raised $3,000 for Sullivan. The next February
Down Beat
printed a story — “Bing Crosby (Dr. of Square Shooting) Known as Squarest Guy in Hollywood” — that itemized instances when
he came to the aid of friends, often by giving them work in films or on radio: “Whenever the stork is hovering over a Hollywood
home, the prospective ‘Pappy’ usually finds himself on Bing’s program as a
guest star — such were the cases of Andy Devine and Harry Barris.”
¹⁷
At Easter he donated a $1,600 organ to St. Charles Church in North Hollywood, dedicating it with a few hymns. For a man who
resisted the press, he had the press in thrall.

The gusher of goodwill soared after January 5, 1938, when Dixie gave birth to her fourth son (Bing told
Variety
they outfitted the nursery for a girl, hoping that might reverse their track record). Lindsay Harry was named for Lindsay
Howard, with whom Bing founded Binglin Stock Farm that very week, and Bing’s father. Quieter than the colicky Gary or the
competitive twins, Linny (as he was called) would be the most indulged of the boys, though his life, marked by severe depression,
would be no easier. “Linny was the only one of us with brown eyes,” Gary recalled. “He differed in other ways as well. He
was a quiet, dreamy, unaggressive child who read a lot, got good marks in school and liked to draw and paint.”
¹⁸
In the excitement surrounding his arrival, all seemed rosy in the Crosby household and in what was rapidly becoming the Crosbys’
world. Weeks after Linny appeared, the
New York Journal-American
editorialized that Bing’s “current eminence” was one of “the grand stories” of the past year and hailed him as “the typical
American, still young yet the father of four boys, singing his way honestly through life and brightening the way of others
with his affable, smiling, melodious voice which radiates friendliness in the loudspeaker.”
¹⁹

Bing was celebrated in one poll as Hollywood’s most typical father, and there were no signs that anything was amiss. Dixie’s
drinking was under control, she entertained, she accompanied Bing to numerous social functions. But trouble was around the
corner, in part an unexpected consequence of Bing’s homecoming broadcast, which spurred him to take subsequent programs on
the road, requiring longer absences from home. A year or two later, Dixie and the marriage would be in trouble, but not yet.
“The children were all lovely boys,” Dixie’s friend Pauline Weislow recalled, “and she was very involved when they were young.
She meant to be a wonderful parent. What was so very interesting is that such public persons as Bing and Dixie were so private.”
²⁰

Since the demise of her film career, Dixie had reluctantly agreed to a few professional appearances, among them a guest spot
on Al Jolson’s radio show and a 1936 recording session with Bing, at which
they sang two superb songs by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, introduced that year by Astaire and Rogers in
Swing Time.
Astaire, Billie Holiday, and Guy Lombardo enjoyed hits with the arch “A Fine Romance” and the incomparably wistful “The Way
You Look Tonight”; Bing and Dixie did not. But their renditions have a unique, unforgettable pathos that sets them apart.
Bing’s expertise at duets, from his apprenticeship with Al Rinker to his give-and-take with the Mills Brothers, was already
known, though his unrivaled finesse as a quick-witted, funny, supportive partner of other singers was truly confirmed a couple
of years later in records with Connie Boswell and Johnny Mercer. With Dixie, he is relatively guarded, but his formality is
protective, mandated by their inability to sing in the same key. Their musical seclusion underscores an emotional detachment,
despite Victor Young’s spare and affectionate arrangements, which were devised to accommodate their disparate ranges.

Young was abetted by the material itself. “The Way You Look Tonight,” one of the incontestable triumphs of American popular
song, has two enharmonic changes, signaled by a transitional instrumental figure built into the melody — leading in to and
out of the release. Young shrewdly employs those transitions to facilitate and minimize the shift in keys that occurs every
eight bars, as Bing and Dixie exchange passages of that length. With his wide range and finesse, Bing carries the burden of
those shifts, which are brought off so well that the listener is barely aware of the elevator ride transporting each singer
to a harmonically suitable floor. Yet the manipulation of keys distances Bing and Dixie, who harmonize only briefly, on the
title phrase. They sound at times as isolated as if they had been wired in from different studios, she passive and wounded,
he expert and strong. Dixie’s melancholy nasality, though passé, emanates feeling. Their attempts at humor on “A Fine Romance”
are tense, despite Bing’s fleeting mimicry of W. C. Fields (“potatoes”) and Martha Raye (“oh boy”), but “The Way You Look
Tonight” is an affecting record, lacking an essential bond of communication and in that absence striking a forlorn, immensely
touching chord.

Any pretense of continuing her career was long over for Dixie by the time Linny was born. Except for parties, she rarely sang
in public. Once on a Sunday night at the Century Club, Bing coaxed her, and
she sang “You Are My Lucky Star” to an audience that included Jimmy Dorsey, Joe Venuti, and Zeppo Marx. Mostly she sang in
the house. Her son Phillip remembered her chirping along with Ella Fitzgerald’s “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” all day long.
²¹
When the kids accidentally broke the record, she ran out to buy another. Within a few years her shyness would congeal into
reclusivity, but now she was regularly seen on Bing’s arm: watching the boxing matches at Wrigley Field or attending the racetrack,
sipping cocktails to celebrate the engagement of Anne Shirley and John Payne or at a party at Barbara Stanwyck’s (Bing sang).
She threw buffets for friends like the Johnny Burkes, the Edmund Lowes, the Johnny Mercers, the Joe Venutis, and the Andy
Devines; celebrated anniversaries with the Pat O’Briens and the Joe E. Browns. The Crosbys dined at Chasen’s and the Cocoanut
Grove and the House of Murphy; after the races they stopped for drinks at Cafe La Maze or Club 17. When Bing appeared as a
guest on the debut of Paul Whiteman’s new Chesterfield show, she improvised a soiree, and she was there to cheer the gala
debut of Earl Carroll’s theater and restaurant.

And as if their dance cards were not filled top to bottom, Bing and Dixie formed a mummers society, the Westwood Marching
and Chowder Club (North Hollywood Branch). However much Bing was a product and innovator of technology, he remained a son
of the nineteenth century and the show-business traditions that dominated his youth. Though he married one of its daughters,
Bing continued to view the South as a musical-comical never-never land, a state of mind and a trove of irresistible material.
“He did like southerners,” Kentucky’s Rosemary Clooney recalled. “He loved southern women — it was almost a prerequisite.
He wouldn’t ask anyone if they were southern, but he got along with southerners very well.”
²²

The Marching and Chowder Club was spurred by the Crosbys’ friendship with their neighbors in Toluca Lake, Herb Polesie, a
radio producer, and his wife, Mildred, whom everyone called Midge. (As Mildred Lovell, she wrote a society column for the
New York
Daily News).
Phillip Crosby remembered Midge as a member of the circle of six who surrounded Dixie, along with Pauline Weislow, Kitty
Sexton, Sue Carol, Alice Ross, and Julie Taurog, whom Phillip said had problems with her husband, director Norman Taurog,
and spent more time at the Crosby home than at her own. Herb, who would
soon produce
Kraft Music Hall
and two of Bing’s movies, was described by Phillip as “one of the nicest guys in the world.”
²³
A press release identified him as the Marching and Chowder Club’s president; the program for its first presentation,
The Midgie Minstrels,
credits him as “Interlocutor and ticket taker.”

The show was held in the Crosby home on April 16, 1938. John Mercer and Joe Venuti were the end men. Bing appeared, according
to a program note, by permission of the Emanuel Cohen Minstrels. As most of the wives had show-business experience, they performed
along with their husbands; the couples included the Pat O’Briens, Johnny Burkes, Johnny Mercers, Larry Crosbys, David Butlers,
Joe Venutis, Edmund Lowes, and Perry Botkins. Kitty Sexton performed under her maiden (and
Ziegfeld Follies)
name, Rasch; her husband, the veterinarian, also did a number. Bing printed up the jocular playbill (“one performance only”):