Bing Crosby (22 page)

On his first evening in Hollywood, however, Bing may have been too smashed to notice anything. Benny Stafford kept buying
rounds, and Bing downed them all. By the time the foursome left, at two, Bing had rubber legs. During the next few years,
he would develop a reputation as a lush, but when genuine stardom beckoned, his talent for nursing one drink or forgoing a
cocktail at all convinced many that he was never a true alcoholic. “There has been a lot of talk about Bing being a heavy
drinker when he was young,” Al observed. “Every once in a while when I worked with him he would go on a little binge, but
he was not a steady drinker.”
¹⁶

The next evening Bing and Al drove to the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel to see their former colleague from the Musicaladers,
Jimmy Heaton, who was playing trumpet in Ray West’s orchestra. Jimmy was delighted to see them, and as the next day, Monday,
was musicians’ night off, he suggested an outing. Jimmy drove his friends down to San Diego, where they stopped to visit his
cousins (the Carr brothers, who had a band), then continued across the border to Tijuana, where Al and Bing were shocked by
the aggressive whores who tried unsuccessfully to lure them into their shacks. On the way back they stopped at Ryan Airfield
near San Diego, where Lindbergh’s
Spirit of St. Louis
was assembled a year later. For three dollars, Bing and Al took a ride in the rear open cockpit of a plane, circling over
the ocean. With the wind blowing in their faces, they were scared to death and held on with white-knuckled grips. Al recalled,
“When we landed we couldn’t get out of that old Jenny fast enough.”
¹⁷
For Bing, the flight had long-lasting repercussions. He would avoid planes whenever possible for most of his life, preferring
train travel or ocean liners. He was uneasy about heights, and in hotels reserved rooms on the lower floors.

Bing and Al continued to live with Millie for a week or so, and she took them under her wing, making calls on their behalf
and introducing them to her show-business friends. Mildred Bailey would one day be recognized as one of the first of the great
women jazz singers, the key transitional figure between Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith and band singers like Billie Holiday
and Ella Fitzgerald. Her small, light voice inclined to a whirring vibrato when she sang high notes, and her time and enunciation
were exemplary. She was bedeviled, however, by a fierce temper, enormous pride, and a lonely soul that she attempted to soothe
with food and compulsive cooking. She did not smoke or drink. Al thought she used the great dishes she prepared and her pets
— a fleet of dachshunds — as a substitute for children. As sentimental as she was high-strung, she was an easy touch and a
formidable enemy. Like many musicians, trombonist Milt Bernhart assumed that she was black when he heard her on the classic
records she made with Teddy Wilson.
¹⁸
When he mentioned that to Red Norvo long after her death, Red chuckled and told him a story that he thought summed her up.

In the 1930s, after Mildred became a star on radio and a headliner with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, a rival singer began spreading
rumors that she was black, and a Hearst columnist picked up the story. Whiteman didn’t care in the least — he’d have hired
black musicians if his management hadn’t talked him out of it. But Mildred was incensed. By this time, she and Red were married
and traveling together as members of Whiteman’s band. One day she asked Paul if he was still friendly with William Randolph
Hearst, whom the bandleader had known during his salad days in San Francisco. Paul said he was. Hearing this, she demanded
that Whiteman phone Hearst and have the columnist fired. Whiteman complied, as did Hearst. A couple of years later, as Millie
and Red emerged from a theater, a man in a threadbare overcoat walked over and asked, “Miss Bailey?” The former columnist
apologized for what he had written, conceding that he deserved to lose his job, and turned to go. Mildred, convulsed with
tears, asked his name and how she could reach him, then went to Whiteman and got him rehired.

She had always been fond of Bing, and despite a misunderstanding or two, they would remain loyal to each other, the one invariably
naming the other as his or her favorite singer. Bing credited Millie with the start of his career and reciprocated in full,
engineering the Whiteman job that took her to the big time. In 1951 he assumed all her medical costs when she became fatally
ill. Indeed, Millie got along better with the easygoing Bing, who liked a good time and shared her advanced and expansive
musical tastes, than with her brother, who thought her “a little too barrelhouse.”
¹⁹
Al, who forgot that Bing had heard Mildred in Spokane, was at once proud and a little miffed about the bond between the two.
“I guess he hadn’t expected to find that I had a sister with so much humor and who was so hip,” he wrote. To Bing, she was
“tnucho mujer}
a genuine artist, with a heart as big as the Yankee Stadium, and a gal who really loved to laugh it up.”
²⁰
He admired her jazzy slang (a dull town was “tiredsville”), which was new to him. Clearly, the role she played in launching
their careers was not limited to providing introductions and arranging auditions.

Bing understood Millie’s rare abilities as a singer, her unaffectedness, understatement, and versatility. And she saw in him.
the real thing, an antidote to the prissy aesthetes who had no swing or feeling
for the blues. Bing, having won prizes in elocution, admired her impeccable diction; she encouraged his innate affinity for
focusing on the language of a song, its meaning, the special story it told. She played records for him and Al, including Ethel
Waters, Bessie Smith, and her pal Tommy Lyman, whose “Montmartre Rose” — the maudlin account of a Parisian courtesan with
“a true heart of gold” — she played constantly
²¹
She listened to it so often that more than half a century later, Al could recite the lyric:

And each tear is a token

Of some heart that’s broken

In your garden, my Montmartre Rose.
²²

More significantly, it appears to have been Millie who first told Bing of a young man in Chicago whom he had to hear if he
was going to be a serious singer: Louis Armstrong. What makes this advice particularly fascinating is that as of November
1925, Armstrong had yet to record as a vocalist (beyond a scat break at the end of a Fletcher Henderson side) and Mildred
had yet to travel to Chicago or New York to hear him. She was familiar with Louis’s trumpet playing from his records with
Henderson and Bessie Smith and may have advised Bing to study his instrumental work, which had musicians nationwide buzzing.
Millie told Norvo that she advised Bing of Armstrong’s genius for inventing melody; possibly she was referring to his powers
as a trumpeter. But Norvo thought she was speaking of his singing. Armstrong often sang at jam sessions, so the advance word
in the jazz grapevine may have been enough to inspire Mildred’s praise. Barry Ulanov said of his old friend, “Mildred was
two things: very hip and very much a gossip…. She’d pick up on anything and if anyone would have known about Louis she would
have known.”
²³
Whatever the circumstances, Bing soon put Louis on a pedestal; their association would prove momentous musically, professionally,
and — in advancing integration in show business — societally

During Bing and Al’s first few days in California, nothing came of Mildred’s efforts on behalf of her lodgers. Bing hooked
up with his brother Everett, who was selling trucks as a front for moving liquor. Ev also wanted to help the boys. What happened
next is unclear.
According to Bing, Mildred arranged an audition with Mike Lyman, the brother of bandleader Abe Lyman and the proprietor of
the Tent Cafe.
²⁴
Bing rented a tux and borrowed the accessories from Everett. Early accounts suggest that they did not get the job, although
Bing would later claim that they worked the Tent Cafe as long as three weeks. Al would deny that he and Bing ever played the
Tent Cafe; but he also disputed another audition of which there is no doubt. This one was arranged by Ev at the Cafe Lafayette.
Harry Owens, who would play an important role in Bing’s career (as the composer of “Sweet Leilani”), led the band at the Lafayette,
and Ev was a frequent customer. Having fared poorly with a “big, brassy and rhythmic” orchestra, Owens fired his expensive
star soloists and switched to “the sweet ‘corn’ of ballads and violins.”
²⁵
Success followed, and Everett pressed Owens to audition the boys. Owens tried to dissuade Ev from encouraging his kid brother
in a career as unstable as show business, but Ev insisted that the kid had his mind set.

Owens agreed to the tryout, and Bing and Al showed up in time to sit through an hourlong rehearsal. Then they took the stand,
Al at the piano, Bing with a small cymbal in his hand. Before they completed their first number, the orchestra musicians,
who had been filing out for their break, stopped and came back to applaud the finish. “Bing had a terrific beat,” Owens recalled,
“but the voice was the thing.”
²⁶
He scheduled them for the show on the following Tuesday; their opening went over well, but afterward Owens told them that
he lacked the budget to offer a regular job. By his own subsequent reckoning, Owens “missed the boat” and allowed the duo
to sail away into Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. Yet he recalled the young Bing with affection: “What a sweet guy he was and so
sincerely grateful.”
²⁷
In the last days of 1925, Bing told a reporter that he and Al got their start in Los Angeles at the Lafayette.

Their real start, however, came when Mildred heard about open auditions for Fanchon and Marco, a sister-and-brother team famous
in vaudeville as dancers, now producing traveling vaudeville units for Loew’s California circuit. Mildred drove the boys to
the audition at the Boulevard Theater and ordered them to relax: “You’re good and I know they’ll like you.”
²⁸
Fanchon, Marco, and their brother, Rube Wolf, sat quietly in the orchestra seats, watching the young performers. When their
turn came, Bing and Al did a few rhythm songs
(“China Boy” “San,” and “Copenhagen”), to which Bing added some business on kazoo, and two comical numbers (“Paddlin’ Madelin’
Home” and “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue”). They were hired at seventy-five dollars each per week for a thirteen-week tour in
the new revue,
The Syncopation Idea.
Rehearsals began immediately at the Boulevard. They found themselves on a bill with jugglers, a dog act, a dance team, and
a sixteen-girl high-kicking chorus line. The show opened on December 7, a month to the day since their arrival in Los Angeles.

Like most new acts that clicked from the first, Bing and Al evoked proven vaudeville traditions while pushing the boundaries.
Not the least of their assets was the same sort of youthful jazz-inflected exuberance and worry-free winsomeness that characterized
their loose harmonizations. They were a handsome team, Al with his wavy black hair and dark eyes and Bing with his lighter
color and piercing baby blues. Their easy manner and horseplay disarmed audiences dazzled by the charge of their rhythm numbers
and the beauty of Bing’s sonorous baritone on ballads. They presented themselves as cutups no less than singers and enjoyed
themselves tremendously onstage. Vaudeville was hard, but fun. Bing saved the shirt he wore during the run of the revue. It
had a false front and buttoned in the back for speedier changing.

Bing may have been a jazz hound, but he had learned the value of sentiment, not only from the great tenors of his youth but
from a famous vaudeville team whose popularity was as fleeting as theatrical memory. In 1976 Bing remarked, “The ballads I
sang a lot like Joe Schenck of Van and Schenck. I imitated him. I imitated McCormack, Jolson. I took a lot from Jolson…. We
sang a lot of scat. What Ella Fitzgerald does now, only she does it about three hundred times better, and I think Cleo Laine
does a lot of it, Mel Tormé. That’s what we were doing. We would sing a chorus straight and sing scat the next chorus and
then go back to the lyric for the climax or something. And we’d sing a lot of comedy songs too. We lifted a lot of comedy
from Van and Schenck and all the other acts that played Spokane at the Pantages Theater.”
²⁹
The report in
Variety
on Whiteman’s 1926 signing of Bing and Al describes them as “youths who have been doing a Van and Schenck type of act in
picture houses.”
³⁰

Gus Van and Joe Schenck were the best-known tenor-baritone team in vaudeville, having starred for several seasons in the
Ziegfeld
Follies.
They achieved particular success in a minstrel sequence singing Berlins “Mandy” (revived by Crosby in the 1954
White Christmas).
Van was a dark, rumpled man who (Brooklyn-born, like his partner) favored southern speech affectations but used his deep
baritone to master other dialects as well;
Variety
reported that he could do “Hebe, Irish, Cockney, Wop, Dutch, and Coon.”
³¹
He also harmonized with and anchored Schenck’s tenor. With his pale eyes, round face, and sweet voice, Schenck brought an
Irish lilt to the day’s sentimental songs. Like Rinker, he worked from the piano. Like Crosby and Rinker, Van and Schenck
imparted the contagious rapport of old pals from the same neighborhood.

In their filmed appearances, performing songs like “Nobody But Me” and “He’s That Kind of Pal,” Van and Schenck exhibit surprisingly
similar harmonies to those of Rinker and Crosby. And yet Bing’s fascination with solo tenors like Schenck or Skin Young (White-man’s
high-pitched singer-violinist) can hardly be detected in even his earliest recordings. One thing Bing and Al did not learn
from Van and Schenck was scat. Nor is it likely they did much of it before the spring 1926 release of Louis Armstrong’s startling
“Heebie Jeebies” — the first widely noted instance on records of an old New Orleans vocal style, which substitutes nonsense
syllables for words.