The Incredible Crosby by BARRY ULANOV Whittlesey House, 1948 SECOND PRINTING
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Incredible Crosby BY BARRY ULANOV Whittlesey House, 1948 SECOND PRINTING PREFACE MY FIRST personal contacts with Bing Crosby, on the Para- mount lot and at the NBC studios in Hollywood, in May, 1944, were brief but stimulating. Restricted to a couple of question-and-answer periods and corollary exchanges of dia- logue, they were all that was necessary to fill in the lacunae in a story on Bing that I was writing for my magazine, and to provoke much more interest on my part in the subject of the story. As no other Hollywood luminary, Bing's person was elusive. Arresting as his personality was, its existence was al- most entirely on celluloid, on shellac, and through the ether. I determined to bring the figure to earth, if it could be done. A serious, full-length biography seemed the logical means of investiture for the disembodied screen, record, and radio spirit, if the spirit were willing. Typically, Bing answered a question with a query. "So many fan magazines and newspapers have combed over my drab background," he wrote me, "that the subject seems to me to be exhausted. Lots of things have happened during the last fifteen years which would be interesting if I could remember them, and if they weren't censorable." That was in the fall of 1945. When I next saw Bing, in January, 1946, upon his return to the Kraft Music Hall program in Hollywood, his interest was considerably enlarged and more positive. From then on, his cooperation was tacit; he suffered my hovering motions around sound stages and radio studios, dressing rooms at Para- mount, NBC and ABC, his Sunset Boulevard offices, and at recording sessions. A man of singular reticence where his own life and times are concerned, a startlingly but genuinely modest person, Bing was most voluble about music and musicians, in- creasingly silent as discussions grew closer to himself. Fortunately, Bing's friends and associates were anything but silent about him. His impact upon their lives, in so many of which he was a central figure, was intense, apparently never to be forgotten, and thus memories of people, places, and events connected with Bing Crosby were easily stirred. No matter how easily stirred these memories were, no matter how stimulating their subject, Bing's friends, teachers, and business associates extended such willing and able cooperation that acknowledg- ment here can only suggest my indebtedness to them. In the preparation of the early chapters, Bing's brother Larry was most helpful, and I was given every assistance in Spokane by Bing's grade-school teachers, the Misses Nell and Agnes Finnegan, and his Gonzaga classmates, Ed Gowanlock, Dr. Joseph Lynch, and Fathers Francis E. Corkery, SJ., and Arthur L. Dussault, SJ., who took valuable time away from their administrative duties as president and athletic director of Gonzaga to reminisce about Bing and to show me about his old school. Al Rinker gave many hours to recalling his boyhood associa- tion with Bing, their dual start as singers, and the years of the Rhythm Boys, And Al's brother Miles and sister Mildred Bailey added anecdotes and other information. Jack Mass, for many years close to Bing and to the Crosby organization, was a valu- able source of documentary material and was available at any time of Hollywood day or night. Les Raddatz and Baldwin Sul- livan of the NBC press department ransacked their Crosby file for me, providing me with rare photos and stories. Bob Hope, Phil Silvers, and Frank Sinatra were eager con- tributors of story and opinion, all wonderfully helpful. So was make-up man Harry Ray ? who proved an invaluable source of material Finally, there were the members of the Circle, direct and in- direct, who gave so freely of their time and energies: Jack Clark, Barney Dean, Jimmy Van Heusen, and the Burkes, Bessie and Johnny, none of whom ever indicated how much they must have minded my impositions upon them, and all of whom, but especially Johnny and Jimmy, are in effect contributing editors of this book. There were many others who offered assistance along the way, too numerous to mention by name, but they must be credited and thanked. I want to thank Father George Ford for looking at the manuscript and Dr. J. T. H. Mize for making available his vast store of Crosbyana. And I should like to add my great appreciation for the tireless efforts of Barbara Hodg- kins and my wife Joan in putting the manuscript in finished order. BARRY ULANOV I am indebted to the following for their generosity in permitting me to make large quotations from their copyright works: to the University of North Carolina Press, for the quotation from Richard Hertz's Man on a Rock; to Irving Berlin, for A Couple of Song and Dance Men; to Mills Music, Inc., for I Surrender Dear; to Sidney Kornheiser and Burke and Van Heusen, Inc., for Going My Way, Swinging On A Star, and Personal- ity; to John Gassner and Crown Publishers, for the ex- cerpt from the introduction to the Best Film Plays of 1943-44; to James T. Farrell and the Vanguard Press, Inc., for Observations on The Bells of St. Mary's from Literature and Morality; to the editors of The Screen Writer, for Harold J. Sdemson's article; to the editors of Salute, for George Frazier's article; and to Al Dela- corte and Modern Screen, for Billy Rose's article. CONTENTS Preface vii Part One: HARRY LILLIS 1 Part Two: BING 97 Part Three: DER BINGLE 203 A Crosby Discography 297 Index 3 2 3 The Incredible Crosby Part One: HARRY LiLLIS FEW MEN have so completely captured the American imagination as Bing Crosby has. And just as few have had their imaginations so completely captured by America and its people as Bing Crosby has. Without waving a flag, with a noticeable avoidance of the Fourth of July oration, he has gone right to the heart of twentieth- century America. In his language and his looks, his dress, in his sports, his ambling gait, his shifting weight, Bing Crosby bespeaks his country. In his voice he sings America, and most of America sings with him. To the public that has made the voice the most popular and far- reaching and the biggest money earner ever, there isn't much miss- ing in the picture of the most open and the least puzzling of its heroes, Bing. One knows, after all, that he is devoted to horses, that he races them and loses races with desperate regularity. One knows that he is Bob Hope's dearest friend and the other end of a charm- 2 The Incredible Crosby ing feud organized by the two men -for radio and screen pur- poses, -with records lately added. One knows, doesn't one, that he is a happy-go-lucky man who whistles while he works and makes a wonderful work of this whistling, that between the horses and Hope, between his amiable singing and casual acting, there is just about time enough to count the dollars rolling in. To his intimates, Bing is the Enigma. They regard him with love and respect and an undying curiosity. For though they know tfiat Bob Hope and Bing Crosby have time for other friends and are not so close to each other as they are to perhaps half a dozen others, and though they also know that horses and singing and making money are not all of Sing's life, they are well aware, too, that the legend of Crosby is a magnificent one and doesn't bear much tampering with. The point is to discover just where the legend ends and the man begins or to learn that they are inseparable. Now he always sang. I ALWAYS KNEW when Bing was going to school. When he was seven and eight and nine and going to Webster, the elementary school a block away from his home in Spokane, he would whistle his way to class. When he was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and more and going to Gonzaga, the Jesuit high school and college one block behind his house, he would sing his way over the fence of his backyard, down the alley, across the street, and into class. "Bing's coming,” Miss Nell Finnegan would say to Miss Ag- nes Finnegan, as they heard the little boy's whistling up the length of a Sharp Street block. Miss Nell taught Bing in the seventh grade; Miss Agnes had him in the fifth. They were more than teachers. They were neighbors who lived just one block away from the Crosbys. And all the Crosby neighbors 4 The Incredible Crosby knew about Bing, though they never thought in those days, from 1906 to 1925, that anything very special would happen to him. They just knew that he was a soft-spoken little child, with a ready smile, a remarkable memory for the names and faces of his elders as well as his contemporaries, and a some- times terrible, sometimes delightful tendency to burst into song or whistle at any time or place. Bing didn't do much singing in Tacoma, Washington, where he was born, Harry Lillis Crosby, on May 2, 1901, and where he lived the first five years of his life. His father, Harry Lowe Crosby, who worked as a bookkeeper for the Tacoma county treasurer, was an accomplished tenor. His mother, {Catherine Helen Harrigan Crosby, was a distinguished member of her church choir, and his brothers, Larry, six years older than he, Everett, his elder by five years, and Ted, born the year before Bing, did their share of juvenile chortling.