Bing Crosby (79 page)

Reviewers, not surprisingly, ignored it. The Crosbys had produced a bewildering puree of fact and fancy, crammed with conversation,
much of it ludicrous. Written in the style of a novel for adolescents (Tom Swift in Hollywood),
Bing
is boy’s life adventure, tracking the hero with the idiom’s requisite luck-and-pluck sentimentality, bolstered with a decent
selection of family pictures. H. Allen Smith wrote, “Bing must love [his brothers] deeply to have ever permitted its publication.”
⁷⁴
In his preface of four sentences, Bing appears to concur. He says he can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in his
biography, “but my brothers have long importuned me for permission to write it.” He refers to their efforts as “sophomoric”
yet claims that “all incidents are true.”
⁷⁵
Larry and Ted more cautiously added to the dedication page (“with fond recollections to Mother and Bing”) a disclaimer: “For
obvious reasons, some of the names and places are fictitious.”
⁷⁶
A truth rings through nonetheless, echoed by Smith: “Bing’s career remains to me an American epic because it is the reverse
of the traditional success story” — he violates the dicta of every schoolmarm, “and look at him!”
⁷⁷

“I was just beginning to dust off a few daydreams concerning a new house and one or two other things; so I will just put them
back on the shelf,” Ted wrote Larry.
⁷⁸
Bing, realizing how little the project netted his brother, enabled Ted to finance a house that summer. But even after Ted
received a promotion at Washington Water Power, he continued to dispatch songs, ideas, and candidates for stardom to Los Angeles.
At Bing’s second annual golf tournament in January 1938, Bing asked Roy Moe, the professional at Spokane’s leading country
club, if he could purchase a membership for his brother. Moe promised to raise the subject with the board. A board member
wrote Bing that Ted would be welcome — “he is very well thought of”
⁷⁹
— and that dues were $221. Bing wrote on the bottom of the letter, “Send check for $221.00. Advise Ted — send me bill for
monthly dues — direct from club if necessary.”
⁸⁰

Ted had not been the only family member circling the golden trough in 1937. Bing’s childhood hero, Uncle George Harrigan,
had come back into the picture, writing to the office with hard-luck tales. Bing sent him $500, to the consternation of his
father. Kate’s sister, Annie, had died, and the widower, Ed Walsh, married the nurse who had cared for her. During their honeymoon
the Walshes visited Uncle George and were charmed by George’s daughter, Marion, whom they brought to Los Angeles. The sudden
appearance of all these relatives incensed the usually easy Harry. “[Marion] is about the biggest fool I ever saw,” he griped
to Ted. “Then old Walsh gets Mr. Wyatt [Dixie’s dad] to take her out to Bing’s house, and she moved in on them for about two
weeks, till they left, this was without an invitation. Oh was Mother and I mad.”
⁸¹
Bing and Dixie, however, enjoyed Marion’s company.

The familial jockeying for favor peaked at Christmastime 1936. “Bing did not send checks to anyone this year, only presents,
but
that old woman
(your uncle George Harrigan) wrote one of his sob letters to Bing,” Harry wrote Ted. George had wanted to attend a football
game, Harry howled, “and dam if Bing didn’t send him a check for $100 — and 4 tickets to the game. I tried every way to stop
it but to no avail. Bing and Dixie think George and Marion are tops. That dam liar and double crosser, I hate her. When she
was here, she did not go see anyone, but stayed at Bing’s all the time drinking with Dixie.”
⁸²

Harry was pleased, however, that Kate had taken to calling him Caliban, “because I like to run around with young folks — ain’t
that
mean though?”
⁸³
Harry and Kate were spending increasing hours at the races. One day they took home $150. “Now Mother is having lots of Masses
said for you all,” Harry reported.
⁸⁴

Bing’s favorite sister, Mary Rose, was having a harder time of it, raising her infant daughter while suffering from a thyroid
condition (“I expect before long people will be mistaking me for Mae West”).
⁸⁵
Her marriage was crumbling, and she studied shorthand to compensate for her husband’s unemployment (“the louse”) while living
on a stipend from Bing’s office — barely enough, she complained, “to pay my board and schooling and keep the kid and I in
Pants.” She closed the same letter, “Dear me, if I’m not just like Dixie — always having to figure out how to save a nickel
here and there.”
⁸⁶
Harry and Kate and all the siblings, except for the independent and happily married Catherine (Kay), seemed to have their
eyes on the till. “Bing has put so much money into the Del Mar Race track, and gambling on horses,” Harry fretted, “that we
are having a time holding him down, in order that he will have enough left to pay the Income Tax.”
⁸⁷

There were no real familial fissures, however, until 1944, when Bing invited Ted to join him in Los Angeles as a publicist
for Del Mar, and Ted prepared a revised edition of his and Larry’s long-forgotten book. The ensuing feud, which involved stock
certificates, theft, Bing’s divestment of his interests in Del Mar, and the book itself, would last nearly twenty years and
rupture forever the relationship between Ted and his unforgiving parents. Yet no one could have imagined such a storm in the
fall of 1937, when the Crosbys reunited in Ted’s backyard for a gala homecoming befitting Spokane’s prodigal son.

The interesting part of Bing to me is that he likes to be with jockeys, with millionaires, with beach boys and with caddies.
He likes colorful people; he likes people who are amusing and aren’t phonies. He’s an unphony man. He’s so distant, but he’s
a very genuine man.

— Johnny Mercer (1974)
¹

As trying as the book experience must have been throughout 1937, Larry looked beyond it to help craft one of the most pleasing
publicity events of Bing’s career, his official return to his hometown — twelve years to the month after he and Rinker drove
off in their Tin Lizzy. Spokane had made overtures as far back as 1932, when hundreds of people signed a valentine, placed
on display at a theater showing one of his Sennett shorts and then mailed to Bing in care of the New York Paramount. By 1937
he contemplated taking
Kraft Music Hall
on the road. When his old friend Mike Pecarovich, Gonzaga’s football coach, visited him in Hollywood, Bing pressed him with
questions about summer training and said he might attend the September game between Gonzaga and Washington State, might even
stay a week and do the show up there.

Pecarovich reported the conversation, and Gonzaga responded with alacrity, offering Bing an honorary doctorate, the only one
he
would ever accept. The timing was perfect, as his visit would coincide with the university’s fiftieth anniversary, its jubilee.
Cal Kuhl and Kraft were delighted with the idea. Bing was committed to raising money for Gonzaga, a project that occupied
much of his attention over the next forty years. He took the matter in hand and dictated a letter, which Larry amended with
a few details before mailing to Bing’s revered disciplinarian, the Reverend Curtis J. Sharp. Bing told Sharp that the event
would have to be in October and that he would bring a well-known actor who had graduated from a Jesuit school, perhaps Pat
O’Brien, Edmund Lowe, Andy Devine, or Walter Connolly, plus a band and other performers. Kuhl wanted to reserve the last five
minutes of the broadcast for the presentation of the degree, Bing noted, so he needed to know the precise particulars and
timing of the ceremony.

Paramount also got into the act. Bing wrote: “We are going to run a contest open to residents of the Pacific Northwest to
select a boy and girl, both amateurs and both under twenty-one, to come to Hollywood for a screen test and possibly a part
in a Paramount picture.”
²
Bing, Kuhl, and others would choose the winners after entrants had been narrowed to a group of finalists. He added: “For
the Kraft show, it is not considered a good thing to charge admission, so we will probably have to broadcast from a point
where only a couple of hundred people would be admitted. Later they propose to give a monster dance and entertainment at the
Armory, using the Dorsey band for dancing, and with Burns and myself and other acts we should have enough to put on a pretty
good show.” Bing offered to give two performances (“if not too strenuous”), “one for $1.10 which would admit everybody to
the Armory or Auditorium and another for $10.00 a couple, for the people on Cannon Hill or those who think they can afford
such a stiff tariff…. I’ll be pleased to hear from you with any suggestions you might have relative to the show itself as
a medium of garnering some shekels for the school.”
³

Sharp mailed him the Latin diploma and a tribute he wrote (along with citations for phrases he borrowed from Tennyson and
Horace), which was to be read by the Reverend Leo Robinson, the president of Gonzaga. He enclosed an English translation of
the diploma “for the less enlightened brothers in your troupe.”
⁴
Sharp assured Bing he was doing all he could to keep their plans from leaking to the press, per
Bing’s request, adding in an aside that Pecarovich, to whom Bing had given a small bit in
Waikiki Wedding,
“is all agog about his part in your new picture
Double or Nothing.
Spokane certainly has had him over the barrel, paddling him generously.”
⁵
Larry wrote the school’s president that “Bing would prefer to arrive quietly without any fanfare, as our first item is the
Mass, and then a day of radio rehearsal and the program with which no festivities must interfere.”
⁶

Larry went public in early August with the news that Bing would broadcast from Spokane and receive an honorary degree in music,
causing much consternation at Gonzaga when the faculty realized that, not having a graduate school in music, the school could
not confer such a doctorate. They changed it to doctor of philosophy, reasoning that philosophy was a staple of a Jesuit education,
but Gonzaga did not graduate philosophers, either. The astute Sharp intended to correctly present Bing with a doctor of letters,
yet the mistake was allowed to stand, by which time the press was so confused that the
Spokesman-Review
reported he would receive “the degree of doctor of philosophy in music.”
⁷

The Bing Crosby Talent Contest commenced a few weeks later. One could not help but notice that many applicants signed on with
names that would not have made it onto a Hollywood marquee, although a few may have been invented for just that purpose: Carrie
Mae Halz, Lyle Dolge, Grant Noble, Mrs. Charles Rainbow, Evelyn Thrasp, Hollis E. Wood.

Anticipation for the big weekend was stimulated by numerous news stories. Bing gave advice on how to hear your own voice by
talking to a door; Jimmy Monaco and Johnny Burke wrote a marching song for GU; semifinalists were chosen for the Paramount
competition; “Johnny” Trotter and Perry Botkin posed with Bing as they planned the show (Trotter had replaced Dorsey in the
months since the original proposal); Pecarovitch announced that Bing was to be his assistant coach when Gonzaga’s Bulldogs
met the San Francisco Dons. The papers endlessly retold stories of the flivver, Rinker, Mildred, Whiteman, and Barris, as
though they were grizzled fables collected by Bulfinch. “SEE! — MEET! — HEAR! BING CROSBY,” the advertisements bellowed: “DINE
With the Stars” Thursday at Civic Auditorium (five dollars a plate); “LAUGH With the Stars” Friday at the Armory (one-, two-,
three-dollar tickets); “DANCE With
the Stars” Saturday at Natatorium Park (ladies one dollar, men a dollar fifty); “CHEER With the Stars” Sunday afternoon at
GU Stadium ($1.15, $1.75, $2.30 tickets).
⁸

At last the day arrived, October 21: Bing’s train pulled in at 7:00
A.M.,
without fuss, and he went directly to the university for mass. His retinue included Joe Perry, who had produced his monumental
hit of the year, “Sweet Leilani,” the best selling disc since 1929; his old friend Connie Boswell (formerly of the Boswell
Sisters), with whom he recorded his current chartbuster, “Bob White”; his
KMH
guests, Edmund Lowe and Mary Carlisle; Bob Burns, Trotter and the band, Ken Carpenter, and Johnny Burke. A week earlier Ted
was under the impression that Louis Armstrong was coming; if that was the case (Louis is not mentioned in the other existing
correspondence), he may have been pulled because of a question Ted, who helped to arrange lodgings, ingenuously posed: “One
thing — how about accommodations for Louis Armstrong. How do you handle that?”
⁹
Larry had arrived earlier in the week, as advance man. Harry and Kate followed. In a photograph taken by the
Spokane Chronicle,
Bing, wearing a mortarboard and gown and holding his degree, stands with his parents, Larry, and Ted, all looking inappropriately
dour. Everett drove up later in the day. Dixie did not make the trip, as she was seven months pregnant.