Bing Crosby (19 page)

The Clemmer had other live entertainment in those months, including singing and jazz piano contests with which Bing and Al
had no connection. The most renowned entertainer to perform was the female impersonator Julian Eltinge, whose only appearance
in a sound film was facilitated by Bing (along with that of several other faded vaudevillians he admired in his early years)
in his 1940 picture,
If I Had My Way
Still, by October Roy Boomer and Universal Pictures had decided to return to a movies-only policy. The mid-1920s were among
the most successful in Hollywood history. The Jazz Age introduced a new style in picture stars; in addition to the abidingly
popular Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Pickford, there was sexy Clara Bow and virtuous Colleen Moore, sleek Rudolph Valentino and
scary Lon Chaney. Theater managers needed no come-ons to keep their patrons loyal and satisfied.

Once again Bing and Al were unemployed, but this time with a difference. As a Spokane reporter wrote ten months after they
left town for California, “all Spokane knew ‘Bing’ and close behind him followed the ever-faithful ‘Al.’” They were established
as a team, and they had something to sell. The market in Spokane offered little promise, and they were itching to escape what
Bing perceived as the smothering provincialism of the “cornfeds.”
⁵⁶
Bing told Charles Thompson, his authorized biographer, that he was so restless, he applied unsuccessfully for a berth as
an entertainer on China-bound ships.
⁵⁷
If this is true — and it seems unlikely — he must have felt sufficiently confident to part with Al and sufficiently discouraged
to follow the maritime path of his ancestors. Actually, Los Angeles was the obvious destination. Al’s sister lived there with
her bootlegger husband. Everett Crosby was there, too, affiliated with a trucking company that carted hooch. With two siblings
already situated, the newcomers were assured of temporary places to stay. Mildred had written Al that she was singing in a
speakeasy and doing well. Al
figured that she probably knew people who could get them started. He suggested the journey to Bing, who jumped at the idea:
“Okay, let’s go.”
⁵⁸

Bing secured his parents’ reluctant blessing. Kate had been hard on him for quitting law — her attitude was another reason
to skip Spokane. But she and Harry were more equivocal than irate when Bing, who was twenty-two, announced his decision. Years
later Harry said, “About the only thing I remember of those times was the day that Bing told us he and Al were going to leave
home and go to California in their rickety, painted-up, joke-covered Ford. Mother and I hated to see him leave, but we didn’t
want to stand in the way of any possible success for him. We thought that such a move might be the beginning for him. We knew
he had talent. As it turned out, it
was
the beginning for him.”
⁵⁹

Al’s father and stepmother were concerned because he was so young, but they held their tongues. Al had repeatedly proved himself
nothing if not resourceful, and with Bing at his side he could at least count on a memorable adventure, whether or not the
move actually led to anything. Al took the Model T to a mechanic for last-minute repairs, after confirming with Bing that
he would pick him up the next morning, October 15. The idea of embarking on a road trip of some thousand miles in a machine
as ramshackle as theirs did not seem especially perilous. The Tin Lizzy was, in Al’s words, “uncomplicated but dependable.”
⁶⁰
It had three floor pedals (stop, low gear, and reverse), an accelerator on the steering wheel, and a crank and pullout choke
out front. The tires were narrow tubes without tread. On the canvas covering the spare a slogan was painted:
EIGHT MILLION MILES AND STILL ENTHUSIASTIC.
⁶¹
Bing and Al pooled about fifty dollars each, all they had from their Clemmer savings.

Al suffered a nervous, restless night, but he was up with the dawn that wintry Thursday morning. He had decided to postpone
his goodbyes until he picked up Bing, since they had to pass the Rinker house on the way out of town anyway. He pulled up
to Sharp Avenue at nine, only to learn from Kate that the habitual early riser was dead asleep. She told Al to go upstairs
and wake him. He did, annoyed by Bing’s seeming nonchalance. Bing finally came downstairs with his suitcase, and he and Al
carried his drums and golf clubs to the car. As
they emerged from the house, a small crowd began to congregate and quickly grew as the two young men packed everything into
the backseat.

One neighborhood girl recalled the scene: “It was early in the morning and all of us kids were around. Mrs. Crosby brought
out a sack lunch for the boys and when the Ford wouldn’t start, Al and Bing borrowed a screwdriver from Mrs. Crosby’s sewing
kit to fix it.”
⁶²
After driving to retrieve Al’s suitcase and say good-bye to Mr. Rinker and his wife, they made one last stop at a service
station at Boone and Division, where the attendant, an old friend, provided them with a free tank of gasoline. They continued
down Division, then turned west toward Seattle, 200 miles away. In a short while, they were up to speed: thirty miles per
hour and still enthusiastic.

Crosby and Rinker —Two Boys and a Piano —Singing Songs Their Own Way.

—billing, Paramount-Publix (1926)
¹

It took two days to reach Seattle and another three weeks to make Los Angeles. In later years the often recounted trip was
invariably dramatized as the archetypal tale of the Road to Hollywood: a plucky journey of two young men in a rickety outmoded
contraption, puttering toward glory. But as they traveled, the recording industry was also taking leaps ahead that would revolutionize
communications technology, preparing the way for Bing’s ascendancy. Great advancements were ushered in during the very weeks
they were on the road. Indeed, the recording industry’s dramatic conversion from acoustical to electrical reproduction of
music practically coincided with their departure from Spokane. That innovation, which dominated the industry for more than
two decades (until the introduction of tape), would help bring Bing’s strengths into the spotlight, leading directly to the
advancement of his true instrument, the microphone.

More than any other performer, Crosby would ride the tide of technology. He dominated records, radio, and movies throughout
a career that would parallel the development of those media in ways ever more suitable to emphasize his talents. Boosted by
technology in the
beginning, Bing eventually became its advocate and master: In the mid-1940s, he single-handedly transformed radio from a live
medium into a canned, or prerecorded, one. Later, the TV industry followed suit. It was through the growth and expansion of
electronic media that Bing became so familiar, so prized, so beloved a presence in American life. But the technology never
diminished his natural ability to connect with an audience. Near the end of his life, when Bing hit the road for an international
tour, many of his older fans were astonished to realize that they had not seen him perform live in four decades.

The year 1925 proved a watershed in the brief and shaky history of the recording business, which, like so much of the communications
technocracy, traced its origins to the Wizard of Menlo Park. In 1877 Thomas Edison built a machine that engraved sound on
a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil. He called it a phonograph — a neologism from the Greek for “sound writer.” But the invention
was barely adequate for reproducing a speaking voice, let alone music, and Edison lost interest and turned his attention to
the incandescent lamp, thereby missing — as Roland Gelatt, the industry’s influential historian, points out — an opportunity
to record such contemporaries as Jenny Lind and Franz Liszt, not to mention Buddy Bolden, the first widely recognized jazz
musician. Edison’s apparatus rested for nearly a decade, until Alexander Graham Bell financed and patented what he called
the graphaphone, substituting waxed cardboard for tinfoil to achieve far greater clarity. The American Graphaphone Company
saw the machine as primarily a Dictaphone, but it renewed the interest of Edison and others, and in 1890 the first commercial
recordings were manufactured. They played two minutes, could not be reproduced, and were about as musical as a seance is conversational.

Tremendous improvements were made throughout the 1890s, including the innovation of flat discs and a lateral moving stylus,
which its inventor, Emile Berliner, called a gramophone.
²
By 1902 the recently formed Victor Talking Machine Company dazzled consumers with mechanical reproductions of the voices
of Caruso and Bert Williams. Yet over the next twenty-three years, the recording process remained essentially unchanged. It
was acoustical and manual, and demanded of musicians and singers that they perform into
mawlike horns mounted on walls. In 1906, the year Harry Crosby bought his family one of the first phonographs in Spokane,
Victor recorded Caruso with an orchestra and manufactured the Victrola, a machine conceived as musical furniture for the home,
not unlike a piano. At $200, the Victrola cost more than a used automobile. To be sure, phonographs that did not conceal their
workings in mahogany consoles were readily available for less than thirty dollars, but Victor’s hot new model for the Park
Avenue set reflected a class distinction in the industry’s competing systems. The well-to-do bought superior flat discs, while
working-class people like the Crosbys continued to buy cylinders until they were no longer manufactured. Cylinders averaged
twenty-five to thirty-five cents; discs between one and seven dollars.

John Philip Sousa initially decried “the Menace of Mechanical Music,” predicting that “a marked deterioration in American
music” would follow as generations of amateurs who had sung and played instruments would now presumably give way to indolent
disciples of “canned music.”
³
The public disagreed and eagerly purchased everything that was offered, an indiscriminate potpourri of indifferently performed
popular music, classics, opera, marches, ragtime, comedy. Records were sold in appliance shops that sold phonographs and in
general or grocery stores. In March 1917 Victor announced its imminent release of “the very latest thing in the development
of music” —jazz, as played by a spirited, hoked-up white band from New Orleans, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. “Livery
Stable Blues” sold more than a million copies. As Europe reeled from the chaos of the Great War, Americans giddily enjoyed
their new role on the world stage. The nation’s new confidence resonated in jazz and in a sumptuous dance music played by
large orchestras that were at once erotic and genteel. Small independent record companies like Gennett (a subsidiary of Starr
Piano) and Paramount (a subsidiary of Wisconsin Chair) put an end to the monopoly enjoyed by Victor and Columbia and generated
a musical boom. Between the surging record sales and Prohibition — the government’s gift to jazz, guaranteeing work to numberless
musicians in speakeasies throughout the land — America was spellbound by the new, raucous, undeniably homegrown music.

With an assist from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories of swains and flappers, the era was inescapably called the Jazz Age, but
it is important
to remember that in those years
jazz
— construed as either an exciting or devilish dance music — had a more inclusive meaning than it later acquired. “Livery
Stable Blues” was labeled “For Dancing,” and even legendary innovators like King Oliver and James P. Johnson played for dancing.
Everything with a beat and bluesy tonality was regarded as jazz, from the behemoth orchestras of Paul Whiteman and Vincent
Lopez to the rhythm songs and ballads of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.

Jazz and black music, not for the last time, rescued the record business in the dim deflationary year of 1920. More than 2
million phonographs had been turned out in 1919, a case of overproduction that brought Columbia to the brink of ruin; its
stock sank from 65 to 15/8. The public had grown jaded. The Victrola of 1921 was not much different from that of 1906, nor
was popular music, as represented by faceless singers like Billy Murray, the Irish American tenor who recorded hundreds of
ditties during the century’s first three decades. Blandness in singers who specialized in making records (and had little reputation
outside recording studios) was regarded as an asset by songpluggers and publishers who thought of them as little more than
shills for sheet music, where the real money was. By contrast, concert performers who made records also helped sell songs,
but they were primarily interested in selling themselves.

In 1920 a thirty-six-year-old vaudevillian with a loyal following in Harlem was invited to spell Sophie Tucker at a recording
session. Her name was Mamie Smith, and backed by a white orchestra, she was the first African American woman to record the
blues and score a major hit. The success of “Crazy Blues” opened doors for black performers, song publishers, and record-company
executives. Mamie was not a true blues singer, but she set the table for many, like Bessie Smith (no relation), who were.
By 1925 hundreds of blacks had recorded, and the wild, rambling diversity of American voices represented on discs enthralled
listeners of Bing’s generation, white and black, who found their souls in the simmering footloose rhythms. Aside from the
exposure it gave him to a wider range of vocalists and styles, the primitive acoustical technology did not serve Bing, a baritone
in a world of tenors, who achieved the clearest articulation when singing into the mounted morning-glory horns that predated
more sophisticated microphones.