Bing Crosby (25 page)

Before their first week at the Metropolitan was up, Bing was handed a note backstage: Paul Whiteman wanted to see them. “We
thought someone on the bill was kidding us,” Bing told columnist Ed Sullivan in 1939. The next morning Bing answered the phone
at the apartment and was about to hang up when Jimmy Gillespie convinced him that he really was the manager of Whiteman’s
band and that the invitation was definitely on the level. The great man was completing his run at the Million Dollar Theater
in a couple of days and wanted to see Bing and Al in his dressing room tomorrow. “After the phone call, Bing and I just looked
at each other,” Al remembered. “We still couldn’t believe it wasn’t a joke. When we talked it over with Mildred, she said,
‘It doesn’t sound like a joke to me. This may be the chance you’ve been waiting for.’We hardly slept that night.”
⁶¹

Home is Never Home Without PAUL

A White Man

A Good Man

A Great Man

—
Variety,
signed by thirteen (white) members of the New York musical community (1927)
¹

In late 1926 no American entertainer outside the movies was more famous, more acclaimed, or more caricatured than Paul Whiteman.
Within a year Charles Lindbergh would fly across the Atlantic and forever raise the stakes on fame. But for the moment, the
tall, egg-shaped Whiteman was the darling of the media — he could make news by announcing his latest plan for a diet. Fastidious
in his bearing, he was the first genuine popular-music superstar, an idol mobbed coast to coast at railway stations in every
city he played. When he returned from his first tour of Europe, in 1923, he was welcomed at the dock by New York’s mayor and
police commissioner as well as by the heads of the musicians’ union, executives from the Victor Talking Machine Company, and
seven bands, one playing from an airplane circling the arriving ship. To the delight of the hundreds of fans waiting at the
dock, a skywriter lettered the air with
HELLO PAUL. TO
many,
Whiteman personified the Jazz Age. You could scarcely avoid his mug, an illustrator’s delight, the original happy face: a
swatch of slicked-back black hair, symmetrical brows and eyes, razor-thin waxed mustache, two chins.

He was born in Denver, in 1890, the son of music educator Wilberforce J. Whiteman, who abominated jazz and broke with his
son because of it. They were testily reconciled after Paul became celebrated as a national resource. (Two of the elder Whiteman’s
other students, bandleaders Jimmie Lunceford and Andy Kirk, would become leading figures of the Swing Era; he must have considered
himself a total failure.) Whiteman first attracted some attention in California, where he led a Barbary Coast ragtime outfit
while holding down a viola chair in the San Francisco Symphony. After a stint in the navy, he organized a popular ballroom
band in Los Angeles. In 1920 he opened in Atlantic City and signed with Victor. An instant favorite with the haut monde, he
soon moved to New York’s Palais Royal as sales of his first record, “Whispering,” soared into the millions. Whiteman became
internationally recognized after he presented
An Experiment in Modern Music
at New York’s Aeolian Hall in 1924. That concert introduced George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” with the composer at the
piano. Whiteman himself was not a composer, but he was a powerful arbiter of taste and considered himself a dedicated advocate
of jazz. Although “Rhapsody in Blue” later became world-famous as a symphonic work, the original version arranged by Ferde
Grofe was a jolting — even rickety — montage of orchestral bumps and moans, beginning with a yawning clarinet cadenza, punctuated
by pounding piano, and finishing with a lovely concerto-like melody. Though by no means a blues, it shivered with blues shadings.

The Aeolian Hall concert was more than a premiere; it was a distillation of Whiteman’s argument with the music establishment.
A passionate believer in American music, he had insisted that a native classicism was in blossom, inspired by lowborn jazz,
far beyond the realm of academic composers and European tradition. This concert was intended to make his case; as far as the
critics were concerned, it did. From that point on, Whiteman was promoted as the King of Jazz. Yet no jazz was played at Aeolian
Hall, except for an introductory performance of the creaky “Livery Stable Blues,” which Whiteman
offered as an indication of jazz in its “true naked form.”
²
It was something to laugh at, a prelude to the scrupulously arranged and executed music Whiteman offered in its place — a
concert ballroom music with damp rhythms and minimal improvisation.

Whiteman was on the wrong boat. By 1926, when his star had risen still higher after another successful European tour and he
and Mary Margaret McBride had published their book,
Jazz,
he knew it. His mistake had been in thinking of jazz strictly as inspiration for serious music, a resource rather than an
art in itself. The same year he overwhelmed critics at Aeolian Hall, another landmark musical event had taken place, one that
went unnoticed by the major dailies. Louis Armstrong had arrived in New York to play with the orchestra of Fletcher Henderson,
Whiteman’s relatively low-profile African American counterpart. Armstrong’s impact was instantaneous, immeasurable, and absolute.
He had transformed the music of Henderson and his chief arranger, Don Redman, and countless others, not least Whiteman. He
infused the basic building blocks of true jazz — blues, swing, and improvisation — with depth and exhilaration. Whiteman was
not about to give up his expansive instrumentation, semiclassical repertoire, or vaudeville variety, but now he was hungry
for honest-to-God jazz musicians.

After extensive listening and long chats with Henderson, Duke Ellington, and others, Whiteman concluded that the best jazz
musicians were black, and he proposed to sign some, including his friend ragtime pianist and songwriter Eubie Blake. His management
came down hard: in addition to all the lost bookings in the South and some in the North, he would risk humiliating his black
musicians, who would be relegated to separate entrances, dining and boarding facilities, and even toilets. Whiteman acquiesced
but countered with his determination to hire black arrangers. He wasn’t the first to do so: his chief rival, Vincent Lopez,
had challenged the Aeolian Hall triumph with a competing concert of his own, commissioning new pieces by Henderson and W.
C. Handy. Whiteman moved more slowly: a few years later he would trade arrangements with Henderson while a young black composer,
William Grant Still, would emerge as his most prolific staff writer. In the interim, he went looking for white musicians who
could play authentic jazz, the real thing. So he was intrigued when his manager and financial adviser, Jimmy Gillespie,
raved about an act at the Metropolitan, two young men, one a terrific baritone. Whiteman said, “If you think they’re the bees’
knees, bring em to me.
³

The day after they got the call, Bing and Al walked backstage at the Million Dollar Theater and knocked on Whiteman’s dressing-room
door. Gillespie admitted them. Bing remembered the huge Whiteman sitting on a bed “looking like a giant Buddha, and he had
a pound of caviar in his lap and a bottle of champagne on his breakfast table… the ultimate in attainment.”
⁴
In later years the more homespun Rinker remembered Whiteman sitting in his dressing gown drinking beer, but when Bing and
Whiteman were alive, neither Rinker nor anyone in the room contradicted Bing’s often repeated recollection. If Bing did inflate
his depiction of Whiteman’s “habiliments of success,”
⁵
it would not be surprising. His vision of the orchestra leader is remarkably consistent with the aspirations of Bing’s boyhood
poem “A King,” the dream now conferred upon a real monarch (of sorts), “in robes of white / With vassals kneeling left and
right.”

In his memoir, Bing said they performed a few numbers in the dressing room, perhaps to disguise the fact that Whiteman had
offered them a job without having heard them. Instead, he had dispatched two trusted musicians to the theater to see whether
Crosby and Rinker were as good as Gillespie claimed. Pianist Ray Turner dismissed them as “cute,”
⁶
but violinist and arranger Matty Malneck was impressed. Malneck said of their act, it was “like hearing a great jazz player
for the first time.”
⁷
Malneck (yet another former student of Wilberfore Whiteman) was one of the band’s few advocates for recruiting genuine jazz
players, so his word was good enough for Paul.

According to Al, Whiteman made a point of saying that he had seen the act before making his offer. “You guys are good,” he
told them. “How would you like to join my band?” He offered them a featured spot at $150 a week each. They would begin by
touring the Balaban and Katz circuit and wind up in New York, where Paul was scheduled to open his own nightclub and perform
in a Charles Dillingham show on Broadway. They would be paid extra for their work in his club, for Broadway, and for each
Victor record they made with the band. With options, the contract could bind them for five
years. “Well, how does that sound?” he asked. “Go ahead, boys, talk it over.”
⁸

The two young men exchanged grins. Bing spoke up. “Al and I don’t have to talk it over, Mr. Whiteman,” he said. “We accept
your offer. How soon would you want us to start?” “As soon as possible,” Whiteman told them, at which point Al said to Bing,
“Say, what about our contract with Jack Partington?” (They were signed to Partington through November.) Whiteman thought for
a moment and advised them to complete the contract and join the band for its three-week stay in Chicago. “That will give you
a couple of weeks to relax,” he said. The next day they returned to Whiteman’s dressing room with Al’s dad to sign the papers.
Before taking off on his tour, Whiteman shook hands with them and said, “So long, I’ll see you sprouts in Chicago.”
⁹

Mildred was delighted, as was Partington, relieved perhaps that they intended to honor their contract. Eleven months and one
week before, Bing and Al had left Spokane in a Tin Lizzie, “just to see my sister and hoping we could get something going,”
Al marveled.
¹⁰
Now they were about to work with their idol, scaling what Bing described as the Mount Everest of show business.
¹¹
Al thought he was living a Horatio Alger fable. Bing credited luck. Yet it would be a mistake to discount the appeal and
originality of their act. Audiences loved them, and Whiteman wasn’t risking much. He wanted something fresh and jazzy, something
for young people, and who better than these two clean-cut kids? He had no way of knowing that in signing them, he had put
into motion the career of the first in a long line of white musicians who popularized real black music (jazz, not mammy singing)
for a white public. This was ten years before Benny Goodman launched the Swing Era, thirty before Elvis Presley rocked.

Bing and Al marked time at the Metropolitan, reprising
Russian Revels.
But a couple of days later, the pair chalked up another first: a chance to make a record. Don Clark, a saxophonist who had
worked with Whiteman before starting his own band, led the Biltmore Hotel Orchestra and had a Columbia Records session booked
for October 18; he invited Bing and Al to sing the vocal choruses on two numbers. On ethical grounds, they should have passed;
legally they were pushing their luck. They had just signed with Whiteman, a Victor artist
who expected them to make their wax debut under his auspices. They accepted instantly. “We were kind of excited to hear how
we would sound,” Al explained.
¹²
Clark gave them lead sheets for two tunes, asking them to work up a harmonized chorus on each. The material was undistinguished:
“I’ve Got the Girl!,” a weak tune by Walter Donaldson, who later wrote some of their most important Whiteman records, and
“Don’t Somebody Need Somebody,” a throwaway by Abe Lyman, the cowriter of “Mary Lou.” No major recording career got off to
a more dismal start than Bing’s.

The session took place in a hastily converted warehouse at Sixth and Bixel, and was engineered electrically. Bing and Al had
to sing into a megaphone-like mike built into the planks of the recording booth. The Lyman tune was abandoned when Bing and
Al could make nothing of it, and Peggy Bernier, a vaudeville trouper with pretty eyes and long bangs, fared no better. For
all the good it did the boys or Clark, “I’ve Got the Girl!” ought to have been junked, too. Singing into a horn for the first
time, Bing and Al could not sustain the blend of their voices. As a result, their recorded chorus is dominated by Al’s higher
voice, though it is moored by Bing’s weighty, more controlled timbre. They sing Rinker’s treatment of the nattering tune energetically,
inserting a measure of scat at the first turnback and attempting a unison portamento that got away from them. The performance
did not do justice to their act — but then again, it wasn’t meant to. Their names did not appear on the label, and their complicity
was further disguised by an accident: the record — backed with another Clark performance, “Idolizing,” vocal by one Betty
Patrick — was inadvertently released at a fast speed.
¹³
Bing and Al sound like chipmunks.