Authors: Gary Giddins
At another party, Bing met a young musician who, after fitful encounters over a period of more than twenty years, became one
of his closest friends, Phil Harris. “I was working a place called Edgewater Beach Club, one of the first of the beach clubs,
with Henry Halstead, who had a pretty big band on the coast,” Harris recalled. “Bing came in for just one night with a private
party and we kind of hit it off because I was playing drums then and he played that cymbal. He was doing comedy songs, something
like — I used to kid him about it later — ‘Aphrodite, where’d you leave your nightie last night’ or something. We hit it off
pretty good.”
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He went to see Crosby and Rinker in Morrissey’s show, which he characterized as an “Olsen and Johnson kind of thing,” referring
to the vaudeville team known for shameless hokum and lunatic jokes.
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Phil was most impressed by Bing’s timing: “He was singing those rhythm tunes pretty good — I don’t remember him doing any
ballads. Those things were rolling.”
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But Morrissey was having trouble making ends meet. At one performance he informed the audience that the show could not continue
because Freed had reneged on payments. In the audience was the agent and future producer Edward Small, who offered to underwrite
the cost of completing the performance. Morrissey had other troubles, however, including drinking heavily and bouncing the
cast’s checks. Everyone was relieved when the show went on tour. But before the company pulled out of Los Angeles, Morrissey
arranged for himself and several members of his cast to appear at an extravagant benefit for the American Legion at the Olympic
Auditorium. Bing and Al found themselves on a once-in-a-lifetime bill of some thirty acts, among them Eddie Cantor, Tom Mix,
Fanny Brice, Pola Negri, Jackie Coogan, and one of Bing’s perennial idols, Charlie Chaplin.
One admirer who phoned their apartment was Jack Partington, a producer of stage shows for two key theaters in the Paramount-Publix
chain: the new Metropolitan in Los Angeles and the Granada in San Francisco. Bing was out on the golf course, so Al went alone
to see Partington, an amicable man who got right down to business. He liked the act and wanted to sign them for his two theaters.
Al initially tried to act casual, but when Partington offered them $300 a week, twice what they were earning with Morrissey,
he quickly accepted. Bing could hardly believe it when he heard the news that evening. The next morning they drove to Partington’s
office and signed a two-month contract that was to take effect after they fulfilled their commitment to Morrissey.
When the Morrissey revue opened in San Diego, the duo was finally raised from the pit to a platform that extended beyond the
stage. The local paper raved about their up-to-date selection of “red-hot mama songs” and credited them with “stealing the
show from those billed as stars.” It described Bing and Al as “two young men whom the audience… wanted to take home and use
for permanent amusement.”
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Some women who could not take them home made themselves available backstage, but these admirers were not numerous enough
to keep the show in the black, and after the company made the jump from four days in San Diego to a full month in San Francisco,
empty seats indicated greater trouble ahead.
The situation got worse after Bing took the opportunity to resume his friendship with Bill Hearst, who insisted on taking
the entire cast, not least the chorus girls, to the campus at Berkeley. Hearst’s frat brothers provided a washtub filled with
pure gin, an ice block, and a decorative orange that was supposed to camouflage the liquid as punch. Plastered along with
the rest of the performers, Bing pulled a Bea Lillie, singing his repertoire of risqué songs, including “Where’d Ya Stay Last
Night,” the Aphrodite/nightie number that had so amused Phil Harris. “Our show bordered on the — shall we say outré?” Bing
later admitted,
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but he denied that the Hearst party was the orgy implied by campus officials, who suspended a few students and prohibited
the rest from attending Morrissey’s midnight shows, thus hastening its demise. Bing felt guilty about the blow to Morrissey,
perhaps more than he would have had he not signed the impending deal with Partington. But Berkeley’s entire student body could
not have saved the show. After the midnight performance on September 11, the company packed it in.
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* * *
Partington revised the team’s contract to encompass a two-month obligation, between September 18 and November 19, beginning
and ending in San Francisco. Bing and Al had a week to kill before the commitment began, and when they read in the paper that
Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, on whose records they had teethed, were arriving by rail to play a month at Grauman’s Million
Dollar Theater, they decided to join the welcoming throng. The band, recently returned from Europe, was at the peak of its
popularity. Al recalled that as they approached the station early in the morning, he and Bing “were more than excited.”
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They watched in awe as such celebrated musicians as trumpeter Henry Busse and tiny banjoist Mike Pingitore stepped onto the
platform, followed by the great man himself —oversize in everything but his razor-thin mustache. “We stood watching until
they all got off,” Al wrote, “then drove away knowing that we had seen the most famous band in the world, in the flesh.”
Whiteman opened the next day, September 16, and Bing and Al were there when the curtain rose, revealing some thirty musicians
in blue-and-gray uniforms. The maestro bowed and lifted the baton, and, in Al’s words, “the sound was like nothing we ever
heard,” big, full, and beautiful, with a complement of violins to soften the brasses and saxophones.
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Busse played his puckish trademark, “Hot Lips,” Pingitore his bracingly strummed “Linger Awhile,” and Wilbur Hall his fleet
“Nola” on trombone and “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on bicycle pump. A vocal trio drawn from the band, made up of trombonist
Jack Fulton, guitarist Austin (Skin) Young, and violinist Charles Gaylord, rendered sweet, high-pitched harmonies. Fulton,
in his effeminate, almost flaccid style, sang a new song, “In a Little Spanish Town,” through a megaphone. Bing liked the
number and quickly added it to his repertoire, but the singer who caught his attention was Skin Young, whose “sensational”
style and “tremendous range” was, he recalled, reason enough to attend the show a second time. Bing claimed, “He could not
only sing things like The Road to Mandalay, he could sing blues songs and fast rhythm songs and he could make sounds as uninhibited
as a pre-Cab Calloway.”
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Bing’s high praise is not supported by Young’s pallid recordings, but his description uncannily portends the Crosby emerging
that year.
Two days later Bing and Al were back in San Francisco, featured players in Partington’s
Purple and Gold Revue,
which within a week
was revised and renamed
Bits of Broadway.
Paramount-Publix billed them as “Crosby and Rinker — Two Boys and a Piano — Singing Songs Their Own Way.” They delighted
audiences and reviewers, one of whom singled out Bing’s customary “Mary Lou.” Shortly before the company was set to return
to the Metropolitan in Los Angeles,
Variety
ran a review by its San Francisco-based reporter, Robert J. Landry (later the trade’s managing editor). The boys’ first major
notice appeared under the heading
NEW ACTS
and ignored the rest of the revue.
Crosby and Rinker
Songs
Granada, San Francisco
Two boys from Spokane and not new to show business, but new to picture house work. They appeared with Will Morrissey s Music
Hall Revue, and were a success in a show that was a flop. Bringing their methods to the Granada, they registered solidly and
on the crowded Sunday performances practically stopped the show.
The duo works with a piano and minus orchestral accompaniment. Blues of the feverish variety are their specialty. They are
well equipped with material, presumably their own. Young and clean cut, the boys found a quick welcome. When they have completed
their weeks locally, they will unquestionably find a market for their wares in other presentation houses.
Wherever the public goes for “hot” numbers served hot, Crosby and Rinker ought to have an easy time.
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In Los Angeles, a tougher town,
Bits of Broadway
expanded to include a fourteen-piece pit orchestra, additional acts, and the banjo-playing emcee, Eddie Peabody, who was
entrusted with much of the responsibility for keeping the show running on time (a necessity as the four and five daily performances
were programmed around an unwavering movie schedule). For their spot, Crosby and Rinker commenced with the surefire “Five
Foot Two” and then debuted their version of the new song appropriated from Whiteman, “In a Little Spanish Town.” The stage
was dimmed except for small blue spots trained on each of them. Microphones were not yet in use, but as Al recounted, the
team had the complete attention of a capacity audience of 2,500 when they did the tune. It instantly became one of their biggest
successes, a signature song like “Mary Lou,” and the first
in the long string of modern standards associated with Bing — if only during his season in vaudeville.
Composed by young Mabel Wayne, “In a Little Spanish Town” is a Latin-tinged waltz built on alternating dotted-eighth and sixteenth
notes with two-measure lulls at the end of each phrase. It gave play to Bing’s rhythmic pluck and provided Al with plenty
of room for piano fills. The lyrics came from the team of Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, whose hits included “Rock-a-Bye Your
Baby with a Dixie Melody” and other Jolson benchmarks as well as the duo’s standby, “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue.” For some
reason (perhaps in deference to Whiteman or because he wearied of it), Bing did not record “In a Little Spanish Town” until
1955, when he cut a jazzy piano-trio version for a radio broadcast and released it on an album.
To dress up their rhythm songs, Bing and Al began to interpolate unison scat breaks in imitation of two trumpets. King Oliver
and Louis Armstrong had made this kind of thing famous in jazz circles, but it was certainly novel and possibly unprecedented
in vaudeville. Suddenly, Bing and Al found themselves routinely stopping the show. This is not showbiz hyperbole; they stopped
the proceedings flat as the audience howled for more. The emcee, Eddie Peabody, whom Al thought was jealous but who may simply
have been trying to keep the show on schedule, did everything he could think of to throttle the audience, but to no avail.
Time had to be allotted for two or more encores. For Bing and Al’s second week at the Metropolitan, the show was revised as
Russian Revels.
Most of the revelers who bought tickets were drawn by the coolly irreverent cutups from Spokane. Those two offered something
fresh and modern, and they put over their art with energy and humor and without airs.
Red Norvo, a vaudevillian of eighteen, was laid up with typhoid fever in a small hotel not far from the Metropolitan when
Bing and Al did the Partington shows. “When I got strong enough,” he recalled, “I walked across the park over to a theater
and I just felt like going in ‘cause I’d been sick so long. The thing that knocked me out was Rinker and Crosby. Just crazy.
They pushed a piano out on stage, a little upright that Al played. Bing had a little cymbal hooked on the edge of the piano,
you know, with the lid back? And they’d sing and they were scat singing even then. Their time was good and they did cute tunes.
I would say it was jazz in those days, yeah. It was a sharp
act.”
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They did scat exchanges on kazoos (“terrible sounding things,” Bing said);
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incorporating a trick picked up from Mound City Blue Blowers records, they played them into coffee tins. “It gave out a wah-wahing
sound I thought jazzy,” Bing explained.
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During the third week at the Metropolitan, the show was reworked as
Joy Week,
and Crosby and Rinker were billed second to Peabody.
They were the Jazz Age personified, two clean-cut white boys bringing a variation on black music to the vaudeville stage with
panache and charm. They represented something borderline radical: a trace of danger, a current from a generation that threatened
to bust out of old and settled traditions. At no time between the Civil War and Prohibition had the nation’s young people
clamored for a music of their own or rebelled against the songs of their parents. Partly because the jazziness of Two Boys
and a Piano stopped a few stations north of the genuine article, the young men — Bing was twenty-three and Al two months short
of nineteen — suggested youth and daring in a way that did not send the “cornfeds” running for cover. They charmed everyone
yet were harbingers of a break with conventions, a fissure gradually developing in the American family. Bing, especially,
signaled the change with his easy wit; cool, distant manner; and unmistakably virile baritone. When he sang a song, he created
drama.
Al, who had idolized Bing for so long, knew his partner communicated more powerfully as a soloist than through his hotcha
settings for two voices and encouraged his partner to do more ballads, more solos. Al’s arrangements were loosely harmonized,
drawn from jumping instrumental numbers. The blend of his voice with Bing’s was edgy, not self-consciously adroit in the manner
of the old barbershop quartets nor as rigorous and inventive as the Mills Brothers or Boswell Sisters, who followed on their
heels. But their loose open-collared style worked in their favor. They improvised until a routine was nailed, then stuck with
it, as every vaudeville team did. Yet Bing and Al were able to contrive the illusion of spontaneity; each audience felt that
it was seeing something different from what others saw. When Bing sang alone, the attitude of the audience changed from jokey
camaraderie to rapt empathy. Drawing on the soulfulness of Irish laments, Jewish theater, and African American blues, Bing
could take a ballad to the cliff’s edge of sentimentality without going over.
He was too honest, too respectful to be manipulative. The audience could trust him with its emotions.