Bing Crosby (109 page)
Authors: Gary Giddins
10
. Cited in the
Philadelphia Courier,
Nov. 22, 1947.
11
. 1960 radio interview by Tony Thomas, for Canadian Broadcasting Company, released on LP,
Conversations in Hollywood,
vol. 2 (Citadel).
12
.
Emerson,
Representative Men
(1850).
13
. Rourke,
American Humor.
14
. According to Whitburn,
Pop Memories 1880-1954
and
Top Pop Singles 1955-1986.
Much of Whitburn’s figuring is based on speculation, so it would be folly to place too much emphasis on his pop-chart rankings,
but the general picture he offers has proved reliable.
15
. According to the annual Quigley Publications poll; Steinberg,
Reel Facts.
16
. There are many others. Crosby made twenty-three gold and two platinum singles, including the only double-sided gold record
(“Play a Simple Melody”/“Sam’s Song”); he was the leading record seller through two decades, the 1930s and 1940s; more than
half his feature films were among the ten highest grossing pictures of the years in which they were released; in 1946 three
of the five top-grossing pictures of the year
(The Bells of St. Mary’s, Blue Skies, Road to Utopia)
were Crosby vehicles, each a sequel to one of his earlier successes; he introduced more Academy Award-nominated songs (fourteen)
and more winners (four) than any other film star.
P
ART
O
NE
1. The Harrigans
1
.
Kraft Music Hall
radio broadcast, Mar. 15, 1945.
2
. This section is based largely on genealogical research by King and Fitzgerald. See their
The Uncounted Irish
and King’s
The Irish Lumberman-Farmer,
as well as King’s “Bing Crosby’s Irish Roots: The Harrigan Family of County Cork, New Brunswick Can., Minnesota, and Washington”
in
Minnesota Genealogist,
vol. 14, no. 4 (1983); a letter from Joseph A. King to Sheelah Carter of Spokane Public Library, dated Jan. 27, 1979, in
library files; and a 1994 AI with King. Much information was also culled from the Crosby family’s
Crosby Genealogy,
commissioned by Larry Crosby and published privately.
3
. Her full name was Catherine Driscoll Harrigan. In several essays and books, King inadvertently gives her birth date as
1782 (which would make her fifty at the time of Dennis Jr.’s birth), yet it was King who discovered, in the 1851 census for
Williamstown, New Brunswick, that she was actually born in 1791. (See
Lumberman- Farmer,
Appendix A,
p. 172
.)
4
. King speculates that Dennis sold his leases in the townlands at Driane and Derryleary, which bordered Schull, in order
to purchase the fares. In Parliamentary Report of 1835 and 1836, two parish priests, Father James Barry and Reverend Robert
Trail, estimated that no more than ninety people of the parish emigrated in 1831 —“they were, with very few exceptions, Protestants,
and in comfortable cir cumstances.”
5
. Swift, “A Modest Proposal,” 1829.
6
. Edmund Burke, in a letter in 1792, described the code as “a machine as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and
degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity
of man.”
7
. Wellington, cited in Woodham-Smith,
The Great Hunger,
p. 20
.
8
. Gustave de Beaumont,
Ireland: Social, Political and Religious,
1839), cited in ibid.,
p. 19
.
9
. The story of John of Skibbereen is based on an undated letter from Bing Crosby’s first cousin, Margaret Harrigan Kendell,
of Redmond, Washington, accessed by King, who says Kendell’s information was given her by William Harrigan, a
first cousin of Bing’s mother. Larry Crosby was under the impression that John used two surnames, Harrigan and O’Brien, and
was known as Organ O’Brien because he played the organ in church at Skibbereen, a part of West Cork where (King writes) “the
population lived so exclusively on the potato that no trade in any other description of food existed.”
10
. Cited in Woodham-Smith,
The Great Hunger,
p. 24
.
12
. See Van Der Merwe,
Origins of the Papular Style,
pp. 10
—14, for a fuller treatment of how the Oriental influence was sustained in Europe’s northwestern countries.
13
.
Chambers’s Encyclopaedia,
cited in the 1972 supplement to the
Oxford English Dicitonary,
under
croon.
14
. AI, Ronan Tynan.
15
. It might perhaps be more accurate to say that Crosby “allowed to be written in his memoir,”
Call Me Lucky,
as he did not so much write as speak it to his collabora tor, Pete Martin. But he did scrutinize the manuscript, and though
he permitted many inaccuracies (not nearly as many as he blithely approved in his brothers’ book), the volume reflects his
wishes. Indeed, it is not impossible that he took an active hand in sections of
Lucky.
16
. King interviewed Father John Deasy of Schull, who said, “[Bing] mistakenly thought his grandfather was born in Ireland.”
The Uncounted Irish,
p. 290
. Several early books on Crosby trace the Harrigans to County Mayo and describe Dennis Jr. as a plumber, misinformation
that Bing unaccountably declined to correct when he vetted Thompson’s 1976 biography.
17
. King,
The Uncounted Irish,
p. 101
.
18
. Others include Louis B. Mayer, production chief at MGM, and Robert C. Gillis, who in 1904 helped purchase and design much
of the Hollywood community.
19
. According to the 1900 census, Dennis Jr. initially entered the United States in 1859, as a carpenter and contractor. He
returned to Canada, however, and married Catherine (Katie), bringing her to the United States in 1867. She was born in March
1836 or 1837 in New Brunswick, the daughter of John Ahearn and Ann Meghan of Ireland and Miramichi, and died on October 25,
1918, in Tacoma. Also “Dennis Harrigan Dies[;] Prominent Contractor, Resident of Tacoma Since 1888 Passes,”
Tacoma Daily Ledger,
Sept. 19, 1915, and “Crosby’s Mother, State Native, Dies,” St.
Paul Pioneer Press,
Jan. 8, 1964.
20
. The Harrigan children were William John Harrigan (1867), Alexander Ambrose (1869), Edward (1870), Catherine (1873), Anne
(1875), Francis Albert (1876), and George Leo (1879).
21
. This was her accepted family name, but there is no
Helen
on her Stillwater birth certificate.
23
. The dry-goods store run by Albert H. Sanford and George H. Stone sold fabrics, clothing, and hardware. It was across the
street from the library at 1115-17 Tacoma Avenue and is listed as Kate’s place of employment in the 1893-94 city directory.
AI, Judith Kipp.
2. The Crosbys
1
. Blankenship,
Early History of Thurston County,
p. 267
.
2
. Ibid.
3
.
Crosby Genealogy.
Larry Crosby’s privately printed chronicle was completed in 1960. Although he kept complete files on the genealogy in the
Crosby offices, they were not available for research and may have disappeared. The
Genealogy
is not an infallible source: it has obvious mistakes (the date of Harry Lowe Crosby’s death is given as 1949, instead of
1950) and contradictions.
4
. Ibid. Larry also claimed earlier English Crosbys: a Yorkshire constable in 1204; a property owner named Golfrides de Crosseby;
and John de Crosseby, a procurator appointed by the abbot of St. John’s in Colchester early in the fourteenth century.
5
. Bing refers to him as Edmund in
Lucky,
and other biographers name him Thomas, but William is the name in
White’s Biographical Bulletin
on Bing, 1946; in Larry’s genealogy; and in the rolls of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants.
6
. Institute of American Archives, certified by director Mendell Peterson.
7
.
Correspondence of James Fenimore-Cooper,
edited by his grandson James Fenimore Cooper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922),
p. 284
.
8
. Mary E. Phillips,
James Fenimore Cooper
(New York: John Lane Company, 1913),
p. 86
. For more on Enoch, see
The Spy Unmasked, or Memoirs of Enoch Crosby, alias Harvey Birch, The Hero of Mr. Cooper’s Tale of the Neutral Ground,edited
by H. L. Barnum in 1831. Also James Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper
(New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949).
9
. Susan Feminore Cooper, “Small Family memories” (1883), in
Correspondence of James Fenimore-Cooper,
p. 42
.
10
. The name Nathaniel became a Crosby good-luck piece. Nathaniel Sr. begat Nathaniel Jr., who begat Desire Crosby (born 1772),
Bethiah, and David from his first marriage, and from his second, Tabitha, Mary, and Captain Nathaniel Crosby I,who was born
in 1782. Nat I married Ruby Foster, begetting in 1810 Captain Nathaniel Crosby II, and later married (in 1831) Mary Lincoln
in Wiscasset, Maine, begetting another Nathaniel in 1835, as well as Mary Lincoln and Martha Ruby.
11
. The passenger list for the
Grecian
included Captain Clanrick Crosby, his wife, Phebe F. Crosby, and their three children, Clanrick, Phebe Luisa, and Cecilia;
First Officer Washington Hurd and his wife (Clanrick’s sister) and their two-year-old daughter, Ella; Second Officer Albert
Crosby (Clanrick’s younger brother) and his wife; Mrs. Mary Crosby, wife of Captain Nathaniel Jr. and three children, Nathaniel,Mary,
and Martha; Mrs. Holmes, companion-housekeeper; Captain Nathaniel Crosby Sr., the father of the captain and second officer;
and one passenger, Mr. Converse Lilly of New York — all in the cabin. Forward, there were seven more, including the three
brothers of Mrs. Nathaniel Crosby Jr: Joseph Taylor, Foster Lincoln, and Nathaniel Lincoln.
12
. Martha married a ship chandler and remained in China until 1864, when she brought her son to San Francisco to escape a
cholera epidemic. She resettled in Olympia, where her mother and siblings were. Her husband died of cholera in China, and
she lived in Tumwater for the next two years, then married Andrew Burr, Capital City’s postmaster and a loquacious politician,
and had three children.
13
. Goldie Robertson Funk, “The Old Crosby Home at Tumwater,”
Seattle Times,
Mar. 20, 1949.
14
. AI, KenTwiss.
15
. Catherine Crosby, “A Mother’s Day,” unidentified magazine clip (c. 1947). BCCGU.
3. Tacoma
1
. Burt McMurtrie, “It Seems to Me,”
Tacoma Daily News,
Sept. 29, 1948.
2
. Most of the material on the treasurer’s office and Harry’s early employment is from an analysis of county records by Judith
Kipp of the Tacoma Public Library, Northwest Room. Election results from Bonney’s
History of Pierce County.
3
.
Tacoma Daily Ledger,
Dec. 14, 1902. The deed was turned over by Alexander T. Hosmer to Catherine H. Crosby for $850 on January 6, 1903.
4
.
Tacoma Daily Ledger,
May 4, 1903. “Summer arrived full blown in Tacoma yesterday,” the story began, “and the whole city was out taking the open
air. The day was perfect, with twelve hours of warm, mellow sunshine and a gently stirring breeze, ideal weather for outdoor
recreation.”
5
.
Tacoma Daily Ledger,
May 5, 1903: “The home of Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Crosby was gladdened yesterday by the arrival of a son.”
6
.
Tacoma Daily News,
May 6, 1903.
7
.
Tacoma Daily Ledger,
May 7, 1903: “A little son arrived May 3 in the home of Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Crosby.”
8
. Reverend Anthony LeBlanconce was parish priest and signed the register, which reads “Henrieum Lillis.”
9
. Paul Vandervoort II, “Uncle Sam Sans Whiskers,”
Band Leaders Magazine,
Jan. 1946.
10
. Intrepid researchers in the 1940s had little difficulty finding the truth —indeed, until the mid-eighties, the only book
to get it right was Mize’s
Bing Crosby and the Bing Crosby Style.
The Associated Press Biographical Service had the correct year (wrong day) in a 1946 Crosby sketch but altered it to 1904
as of 1949, presumably acceding to pressure from the Crosby organization. In 1949 Bing’s business manager, Basil Grillo, noticed
discrepancies regarding his age on several life-insurance policies: “Everyone of them had a different age, all the way from
1901 to 1904. When an insurance policy doesn’t state the right age, they adjust the payments accordingly when it comes time
to pay off. So not understanding the actor’s mind, I innocently went to Bing and I said, ‘Bing, we’ve got a lot of policies
here and they all have a different birth date for you, which really changes the amount of insurance we carry’ I asked, ‘When
were you actually born?’ He says, ‘Nineteen hundred and four.’ Even for business reasons, he was born in 1904. Everything
related back to his success as a movie actor. He tried to protect it, and I think the age thing was an outgrowth of that.
He once told me, ‘In this business, youth is everything.’ Maybe he convinced himself that he was born in 1904. Who knows?”
Grillo believed that Crosby was born in 1901, because Larry said so. Yet by 1957 no one in the family could have been in doubt.
That year, in advance of his second marriage, Bing himself obtained a baptismal certificate with the correct date; shortly
thereafter, Larry prepared the genealogy he distributed to the family, correctly identifying his brother’syear of birth. Yet
1901 and 1904 continue to crop up in reference works. AI, Basil Grillo.