Authors: Gary Giddins
With his nearly photographic memory, Bing found that most subjects came reasonably easily. Leo Lynn, Bing’s factotum (stand-in,
driver) for more than forty years, was a fellow student at Gonzaga and admired his sharpness and style. Bing could “rattle
off Latin, was terrible at mathematics, good at Greek and history,” he recalled.
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Despite difficulties in algebra (one semester he wrote an essay called “Why Algebra and Geometry Are Unnecessary in the Modern
High School Curriculum”), Bing seemed bound for a conscientious academic career. He received distinctions in history, English,
and Christian doctrine and was elected sergeant-at-arms (Frank Corkery was elected vice president) in his first year. With
his instantly appreciated sonorous voice, he was chosen to read aloud an original composition to the freshman class. He faced
thirty boys in uniform white blouses without a trace of nerves. Come spring, he was one of the fifty students competing in
the annual high-school elocution assembly, and one of only fourteen chosen for “public exhibition.” He read “Old Watermelon
Time.”
At Gonzaga’s neighboring church, St. Aloysius, Bing put his Latin to use as an altar boy, attending service daily at 6:30
in the morning every third week throughout his four years of high school.
Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum
(To God who gives joy to my youth) was forever imprinted in his memory. “I served mass all over Spokane when I was up there,”
he said. He served in later years as well, at least twice on transatlantic liners, assisting shipboard priests. “Of course,”
he observed of those experiences, “I had to use the book. I couldn’t remember all the responses, but I guess I got by all
right.”
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Bing Crosby is the only major singer in American popular music to enjoy the virtues of a classical education. It grounded
his values and expectations, reinforcing his confidence and buffering him from his own ambition. As faithful as he was to
show business, his demeanor
was marked by a serenity that suggested an appealing indifference. He had something going for him that could not be touched
by Hollywood envy and mendacity. He acted in the early years of his career as if he didn’t give a damn, displaying an irresponsibility
that would have ensured a less talented man’s failure, and he learned to turn that knowing calm into a selling point. Other
performers worked on the surface, but Bing kept as much in reserve as he revealed. He was as cool in life as he was in song
or onscreen. He was the kind of man who, notified by phone the day after New Year’s 1943 that his family was safe but his
home had burned to cinders, deadpanned, “Were they able to save my tux?” The Jesuits trained him to weigh the rewards of this
world versus those of the next and to keep his own counsel. His brother Bob once said, “As an actor he played Bing Crosby,
‘cause he went to Jesuit school all his life. He knew the Jebbies pretty well.”
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Bing himself was willing to give them much of the credit. Classes in elocution, in which he excelled, taught him not only
to enunciate a lyric but to analyze its meaning. At Gonzaga High, education was idealized in the phrase
eloquentia perfecta
(perfect eloquence). Students coached in literature were expected to attain rhetorical mastery as well. However casual a
student Bing may have been — however much an underachiever, in the opinion of some teachers — he maintained better than average
grades until his last year of pre-law, sustaining a consistent B/B+ average and taking several honors. “We had a lot of experience
in public speaking and debating societies, standing on your feet and talking, and doing plays,” he emphasized, “and if I have
ability as an actor, that’s where I got it.”
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The Crosbys placed great stock in education, less in graduation. Harry Lowe dropped out of school, and so would most of his
sons. (Catherine and Mary Rose attended Holy Names Academy, the neighboring convent school, and North Central High, but like
most women in working-class families were not expected to attend college.) Yet Kate and Harry labored hard to keep the boys
in school as long as possible. When Everett left to take a job, Kate’s disappointment was relieved only by the idea that his
salary would help the younger boys graduate.
Larry, the oldest, did graduate. He described the family’s “common traits” as “natural conservatism, civic and patriotic interests,
and
devotion to education and learning, even at a time in our early history when such attainments were not common.”
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He proceeded to tally history’s most learned Crosbys, without explaining how or if they figured in the direct family line:
surgeons, jurists, scholars, writers, reformers, soldiers, and politicians, among them William George Crosby, a legislator
in Maine after the Civil War; Howard Crosby, a reformer, clergyman, and writer, and his son Ernest, a prolific if marginal
poet; and Cornelia Thurza Crosby, a trout fisherwoman called Fly Rod Crosby, after she outraged an assembly of sportsmen at
Madison Square Garden by showing up in a green skirt “seven inches above the floor.”
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Most significant from a musical angle was Frances (Fanny) Jane Crosby, the blind poet and hymn writer, who died in New York
City in 1915 at ninety-five, credited with 8,000 hymns, including “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “There’s Music in the Air,”
and a lyric to “Dixie” with which she attempted to turn that anthem into a Northern rallying cry, called “On! Ye Patriots
to the Battle.”
On Good Friday 1917 President Wilson read his proclamation of war, and Gonzaga, like most campuses, hummed with patriotic
commotion. The exodus of young men began in early June. Larry and Everett, gone from school by then, were instantly caught
up in the fever. Larry quit his job as a clerk for New York Life Insurance and applied to officers’ training camp at the Presidio,
leaving straightaway for San Francisco. Everett, who had left his job as assistant auditor at the Davenport Hotel to pursue
greener prospects in Montana, wrote home that he had enlisted in the field artillery. (“I never rode a horse before in my
life but I tried not to let the officers know it.”)
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Ted, a year below draft age, went to college, where he spent much of his time writing spy stories set in shady European capitals.
The older boys were away more than two years. Larry served as second lieutenant and commanded the Forty-fourth Company of
the depot brigade at Camp Funston, Kansas; after the armistice, he was made camp insurance officer. Ev, a sergeant in the
American Expeditionary Forces, was sent from Douglas, Arizona (where he boasted that he won a football game for the Eleventh
Division Field Artillery), to St. Aignan. After he was decommissioned, he savored Gay Paree for two years, working part of
the time as an American guide, living the high life, mastering French. Kate had hoped the conquering
heroes would help pay for the younger boys’ schooling and shared her hope that either Ted or Bing would join the priesthood,
a future Bing claimed to have contemplated.
An event that occurred when he was a teenager of fourteen made it clear that Bing was probably not destined for the clergy.
He had taken a summer job as a property boy at Spokane’s prize theater, the Auditorium, and saw some of the finest acts and
revues of the day.
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On the evenings of June 19 and 20, Bing watched backstage as Al Jolson played his standard character, Gus, in
Robinson Crusoe Jr.
It was a role he had created a few years earlier: the canny black servant — in this farce, a chauffeur doubling as Friday
— who always saves the day. A whirlwind comedian, Jolson raced around the stage ad-libbing lines and business, even song lyrics.
During the show’s fifteen-month tour, he was billed for the first time as “the World’s Greatest Entertainer.”
Bing was spellbound by the electrifying blackface performer. Jolson brought the house down with his spoof of Hawaiian songs
“Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula” and the lunatic “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?” (cowritten by the same
team that wrote Bing’s early signature song ten years later, “In a Little Spanish Town”).
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Bing and his friends knew and admired Jolson’s recordings, but neither records nor all the live vaudeville he soaked up on
weekend evenings prepared him for the man’s galvanizing energy. “I hung on every word and watched every move he made,” he
recalled. “To me, he was the greatest entertainer who ever lived.”
23
At fourteen, Bing began to imagine himself before the footlights; he kept those dreams to himself.
Harry’s fortunes had wavered uncertainly for two years, but at long last Inland Brewery’s stockholders “concluded to accept
present conditions as to prohibition” and changed the corporate name to Inland Products Company.
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They authorized the expenditure of $175,000 to erect a modern cold-storage warehouse and convert the brewery into a vinegar
factory. Reincorporated in 1917, the firm elected four officers: the three original partners and H. L. Crosby, secretary,
whose duties also included selling merchandise from a new retail shop that stocked pickles, sugared cider, ice, candy, ketchup,
ice cream, soda water, and near beer.
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It promoted itself as the “Home of
22 Varieties.” Pickles assumed particular prominence after Inland contracted with a distributor that supplied New York’s Lower
East Side Orthodox Jewish community. A Spokane rabbi regularly visited the plant to certify its pickles as kosher.
Harry would coast reasonably well until 1923, when senior partner Charles Theis appointed his son secretary and laid off Harry,
bringing him back as shipping clerk. A man whose father worked as foreman of the plant recalled that as a boy he and his friends
visited the shop to buy soda and candy. Mr. Crosby would come out of the back office and wait on them: “A very pleasant fellow,
very pleasant. Medium build and, well, he wasn’t a handsome guy, but he was a nice-looking fellow. He had a very good personality
and everybody liked him.”
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Harry’s own boys were ambivalent; they knew very well who controlled the Crosby house. “She was a matriarch,” Bob said of
Kate, adding, “we were shanty Irish,” to explain the tradition.
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Kate was strict and hard, though not the terror she became in later years, when Bing’s office workers doused their cigarettes
and smoothed their skirts because they heard she was in the building. When Bing was young, Kate was the powerful center of
his life. Her will ultimately helped drive him from Spokane, but he left with an armor of independence and raw nerve. Kate
alone could always threaten his equilibrium. Until she died, her sudden appearance in a room would prompt him to put aside
his drink and snuff his cigarette. Peggy Lee recalled a party at the Crosbys’ when she and Bing were conversing near the piano.
As Mrs. Crosby walked in, Bing maneuvered his glass behind some picture frames.
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Asked, as he often was, if he attributed his success to any particular factor, Bing usually answered: “I think my mother’s
prayers. She’s always been a firm believer in the efficacy of prayer and since I was a little boy, she prayed for all of us
daily, and had masses said for us and rosaries, and the nuns up in our parish, the Poor Clares, they’re a cloistered order
— they don’t ever get out of the monastery — she would bring them meals and take their laundry out and do all kinds of things,
and they always prayed for me and for the family, for our health and our well-being, both spiritual and physical…. If I’ve
been lucky, and I certainly have been inordinately lucky, why I think you have to attribute it to the efficacy of prayer.”
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When Bing was not
honoring his mother’s probity, he would issue credit for his success to producers, managers, and associates, claiming for
himself only the good sense to take their advice. If Kate had sent him on his way with a ready supply of confidence, she also
instilled in him the old Irish commandment to keep his head down.
Harry’s finances intensified the need for his kids to earn money on their own. “Dependability was a necessity in our house
with seven youngsters around and a happy life only possible if everyone followed an established pattern of family routine,”
Kate later explained. “The older ones,” she continued, “had to help with the younger ones and they had to try not to be an
expense on the family purse. When their clothes and their parties became an item, they had to seek methods of earning their
way a little to help out.” Bing had no trouble with this. Kate once overheard him tell a friend, “I like a jingle in my pocket
that’s my very own.”
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Bing probably worked as many jobs as the rest of the Crosby children combined — in addition to his household chores, which
included, at various times, keeping the woodbox full, scrubbing floors, mowing the lawn, and raising chickens in the yard.
He was always on the go — early to bed and early to rise, making the most of every waking moment. He was available to milk
cows, run errands, and mow lawns. In harvesting season he raced out with other kids to “thin” the apple orchards. Not that
he needed authorization to harvest. His friend Benny Ruehl remembered Bing and the other boys stealing cherries from trees
in his front yard. “My mother squirted the boys with a garden hose to get them out of the trees.”
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Ruehl also recalled the time one boy successfully dared Bing to bellyflop into a mud puddle, while Harry stood by and laughed.
Harry could not help but admire Bing’s resourcefulness. His high-school jobs during summer and holidays included — in addition
to lifeguard and caddy —postal worker, boxing usher, grocery-truck driver, woodchopper at a resort, and topographer at a lumber
camp.
And he still came up short. Delbert Stickney, whose family lived down the street, often went to the movies with Bing. Delbert’s
mother worked in a department store downtown, and the boys regularly stopped by her counter to bum change for the show. When
he visited the Stickney home, Bing would sit in the parlor, singing and pecking a song on the piano with one finger while
cradling Delbert’s
baby niece Shirley on his lap. In 1948 Shirley’s daughter suffered an attack of polio and could not afford treatments. Hearing
that Bing was stopping in Spokane, Mrs. Stickney went to his hotel and asked for a loan. “No, I won’t loan it to you,” he
told her, “but I’ll give it to you. All the quarters Delbert and I borrowed from you including interest must be close to that
amount.”
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