Bing Crosby
Authors: Gary Giddins
BING CROSBY: A POCKETFUL OF DREAMS The Early Years 1903-1940
Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the Theater Library Association Award
“Gary Giddins has performed a great service in tracking Crosby’s life and career so scrupulously. He’s not only superb on
the music, but he also has lovingly considered the films of the ’30s…. A masterly performance.”
— Robert Gottlieb,
New York Times Book Review
“A literary tour de force that redefines the pejorative genre ‘show-business biography’ and suggests the genre’s potential
as serious scholarship and even perhaps as art….
Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams
is a compelling narrative of one of our most important and underrated historical figures, and it’s a durable companion. You
have to read the book to get to know him; maybe reread it. It’s that good.”
— Bruce McCabe,
Boston Globe
“An ambitious, literate, and eminently readable biography of the famed crooner…. Giddins’s account is big, but lean; there’s
no padding, but instead a wealth of observation not only on Crosby’s early career but also on its social and historical context.
A pleasure for fans, this is likely to become both the standard biography of the singer and a model for other show business
lives.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“
Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams
demonstrates the advantages of good history over jaded generational memory…. In Bing Crosby, Giddins sees the story of a
monumental cultural force, and the author has given his subject duly epic treatment.”
—David Hajdu,
Village Voice
“A terrific biography…. Giddins takes a fresh and compelling look at the forgotten first half of Crosby’s long career, turning
the clock back to the Roaring Twenties to show how Crosby started out as a hard-drinking, hard-swinging jazzman whose nonchalant
way with a song was universally regarded, even in Harlem, as the height of hipness.”
— Terry Teachout,
Time
“Giddins is a dangerous critic; his writing is so evocative he can make you think yourself intimate with music you’ve never
even heard. He believes. By the end of Part One, the reader does, too.”
— John Anderson,
Newsday
“Giddins has done his work diligently, cutting through the encrustation of myth and press agentry surrounding Bing Crosby
in — and since — his lifetime, bringing welcome clarity to his rise as a singer, radio personality, and movie actor and mapping
his personal life with admirable objectivity.”
— Richard M. Sudhalter,
Los Angeles Times
“The author’s boundless but utterly clear-eyed enthusiasm for his subject is contagious.”
— Joanne Kaufman,
People
“While Giddins covers Crosby’s personal life in detail, including his early alcoholism and marriage to actress Dixie Lee,
the heart and soul of the book is the author’s infectious love of Bing Crosby’s performances. It’s catching.”
— Tom Beer,
Biography Magazine
“Giddins offers ripe social insights and
Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams
soars when it shows what the singer meant to America, not just to American music.”
— John Freeman,
Denver Post
“Hits all the notes, meticulously…. One of the best aspects of Giddins’s approach is his ability to place Crosby in terms
of his time, both historically and musically. The book is an education in terms of popular music…. The definitive biography
for the ages.”
— Deirdre Donahue,
USA Today
“Giddins’s fascination with the environment from which artists emerge enhances all his writings…. He covers Bing’s fabulous
ascendancy to stardom from 1927 to 1935 brilliantly — band singing, stage shows, radio broadcasts, filmmaking, golfing, and
wild parties across the land.”
— Philip Elwood,
San Francisco Chronicle
“No singer should be without this book. It’s the story, among other things, of the man who invented American pop singing.”
— Tony Gieske,
Hollywood Reporter
“As Gary Giddins makes plain in his perceptive and exhaustively researched biography, Crosby was the right man at the right
place at the right time…. Giddins has a keen understanding of who Bing Crosby was, how he got that way, and why he was so
widely, gratefully loved. I await his second volume with eager expectation.”
— Jonathan Yardley,
Washington Post Book World
Riding on a Blue Note (1981)
Rhythm-a-ning(1985)
Celebrating Bird (1987)
Satchmo(1988)
Faces in the Crowd (1992)
Visions of Jazz (1998)
Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams —
The Early Years, 1903-1940 (2001)
Copyright © 2001 by Gary Giddins
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review.
Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, January 2001
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: November 2009
Permissions acknowledgments appear on
page 694
.
ISBN: 978-0-316-09156-5
for Lea and Deborah
and Alice, Helen, and Norman
and Rosemary Clooney
It is a pleasure to think about Bing Crosby.
—Gilbert Seldes,
The Public Arts
To be interesting, a man must be complex and elusive. And I rather fancy it must be a great advantage for him to be born outside
his proper time and place.
—Max Beerbohm,
Rossetti and His Circle
The bearers of the myth of every decade seem to carry in their hands the ax and the spade to execute and inter the myth of
the previous one.
—Murray Kempton/Part
of Our Time
Whatever might have been bad in the first part of his life, was surely condemned and reformed by his better judgement.
—Samuel Johnson,
Lives of the Poets
Let us consider the case of a bodily voice.
—Saint Augustine,
Confessions
Contents
Part One: BINGO FROM BINGVILLE
13: Prosperity Is Just Around the Crooner
16: Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
There was a time, not so long ago, when it was truthfully said that no hour of the day or night, year after year, passed without
the voice of Bing Crosby being heard somewhere on this earth.
—
Gilbert Seldes,
The Public Arts
(1956)
1
His last words were characteristic. Walking off the eighteenth green of the La Moraleja Golf Club, in a suburb of Madrid,
Bing Crosby said, “That was a great game of golf, fellas,” and then took a few steps and was gone.
2
The three Spanish champions who made up the foursome had ribbed the old crooner about his ratty red sweater and white hat,
but Bing and Manuel Pinero won by a single stroke and collected ten dollars. Bing had been in a good mood all afternoon, singing
and laughing during the four-and-a-half-hour match, shooting a respectable 85, a lot better than his 92 the day before. He
was scheduled to hunt partridge in the countryside the next day; then, on Sunday, fly west to the island resort of Palma de
Majorca for more golf before starting home to San Francisco.
But after what was to be his last game, shortly after 6:00
P.M
. on October 14, 1977, about twenty yards from the clubhouse, Crosby silently crumpled. The others thought he had slipped.
When they realized he had suffered a massive heart attack, they frantically
administered oxygen and cardiac tonic injections. An hour later, at Madrid’s Hospital de la Cruz Roja, Bing Crosby was pronounced
dead on arrival — “cardiac insufficiency due to coronariopathies and valvular sclerosis.”
3
His death was front-page news everywhere. In the United States and Great Britain, his passing was treated as comparable to
that of Churchill and de Gaulle. Newspapers then were edited and written by the generation of men and women who came of age
during World War II. They remembered Crosby as a shining light during those years, not merely because Der Bingle had made
the largest number of V-Discs and army broadcasts, toured in England and France in 1944, and raised $14.5 million in war bonds
(a
Yank
magazine poll declared him the individual who had done the most for GI morale) but because perhaps more than anyone else
he had come to define — at a time when national identity was important — what it meant to be American.
Yet to the swarming generation born after the war, all the reverence was a mystery. He was known to them as a faded and not
especially compelling celebrity, a square old man who made orange-juice commercials and appeared with his much younger family
on Christmas telecasts that the baby boomers never watched. He had long since disappeared from movies and the hit parade.
If children of the sixties knew his work at all, it was from his perennial hit record of “White Christmas,” TV reruns of his
Road
pictures with Bob Hope, and his duet with David Bowie on “Little Drummer Boy.” They would have been amazed to learn how advanced,
savvy, and forceful a musician he had been in his prime.
That was the cost of having played Everyman too long and too well. Harry Lillis Crosby was the most influential and successful
popular performer in the first half of the twentieth century. His was the voice of the nation, the cannily informal personification
of hometown decency — friendly, unassuming, melodious, irrefutably American. In his looser and wilder years, when the magnitude
of his stardom was without precedent or equal, he had been reckoned the epitome of cool. But universal acceptance demanded
of him a willful blandness that obscured the full weight of his achievement. Of the few musicians who had synthesized modernism
in popular music and jazz, Crosby received the least serious attention from biographers and
critics after 1950. What Edmund Wilson wrote of Charles Dickens’s standing in the 1930s describes Bing Crosby’s at the time
of his death: he had become so much a “familiar joke, a favorite dish, a Christmas ritual” that pundits no longer saw “in
him the great artist and social critic that he was.”
4
But more than familiarity laid waste to Crosby’s reputation. Popular culture plays by the numbers, and Bing’s numbers — and
the aesthetic they represented — were shaded by those of rock. His art was now as remote from demotic tastes as classical
music or jazz. Four of the last century’s most treasured singers died in quick succession in the late summer and fall of 1977:
Elvis Presley on August 16, Ethel Waters on September 1, Maria Callas on September 16, and Bing Crosby on October 14. All
were American-born and all were celebrated beyond the idioms with which they are primarily associated. Of them, Bing’s stature
seemed especially secure: his obituaries triggered so many record sales that MCA (Decca) could not handle the orders and farmed
them out to other plants, requiring more than a million discs per day. Yet on the twentieth anniversary of their deaths, only
Elvis’s memory was widely acknowledged in mass media. Two years later
Newsweek
devoted forty-plus pages to “Voices of the Century: America Goes Hollywood,” in which Crosby was not mentioned, except to
caption a photograph with Frank Sinatra.
5