Authors: Gary Giddins
The novelty match with Bing was his undoing. The publicity could
not be contained. A photographer stalked them on the links and shot Montague with a telephoto lens, selling the pictures to
newspapers and
Life.
An ex-con in upstate New York saw them and notified the police, who for seven years had been searching for the con’s former
partner. Montague was arrested in Beverly Hills in July and gave Bing as his reference. After fighting extradition for a month,
he was returned to the Adirondacks, jailed for two days without bail, and denounced by the Essex County district attorney
as a “vicious criminal.”
46
His story, as it unraveled that summer, was too far-fetched for a movie.
In 1930 a man named La Verne Moore — known in his hometown of Syracuse as a prodigious athlete, pool-hall hustler, ladies’man,
and well-mannered thug — and three others broke into a roadhouse, beat the owner’s elderly father-in-law senseless, stole
$750, and drove off in two cars, one of which overturned, killing the driver. Two of the thieves were arrested and served
two years in jail, leaving the fourth, who vanished until he turned up in movieland, celebrated for his “phenomenal drives
and deadly chip shots.”
47
Montague denied the accusation, but Mr. and Mrs. Moore — and his fingerprints — confirmed that he was their son, La Verne.
The witness against him was the putative accomplice who saw his picture in the papers. Testifying to his character were affidavits
from Bing, Oliver Hardy, Guy Kibbee, Otto Kruger, and George Von Elm, among others. The only witness called to testify on
his behalf in court was Montague’s ailing mother, who insisted her boy was home in bed the night of the robbery. Immediately
after his acquittal, Montague and the prosecutor who had called him a “vicious criminal” made a date to play golf. The press
was amused.
When it was over, the only person to get a lift out of the episode was Bing. Cal Tinney of the
New York Post
declared him Man of the Week, because, as the headline read, he
WENT TO BAT FOR GOLFER MONTAGUE AND SAVED HIM FROM JAIL.
.
48
The jury was probably more persuaded by the uncanny memory of Montague’s mother, but Bing’s affidavit received more attention.
In the five years they had been friends, he wrote, he had “never known him to behave other than as a gentleman…. The circle
that he moved in accepted him as an upright man.”
49
Bing’s loyalty was greatly admired: he offered, in vain, any amount of bond to get him out of jail in Los Angeles and posted
$25,000 to free him from jail in Essex County while he awaited trial. Everett signed him to a contract with Bing Crosby, Inc.,
which Montague boasted would earn him a million bucks.
That was too much for Larry. “Million dollars!” he yelped. “He’s going to make a couple of shorts showing how he plays golf,
but they won’t bring in more than twenty thousand.” Some magazine pieces were in the works, Larry said, and maybe a guest
spot on
KMH
— “he’ll probably get a thousand or so for that.”
50
Now Kraft-Phenix was riled and declared flatly that he would never appear. Bing was, as usual, blithe if mischievous: “I
don’t know what Monty’s plans are, but he ought to make a lot of money. I suppose he’ll go into pictures…. I imagine he’ll
play roles such as George Bancroft plays.”
51
At which point the story came to a full stop. Montague never worked in films, never capitalized on his immense fame in golf,
never made any kind of news at all. Absent from the extended golfing section in
Call Me Lucky,
he had by the time of its publication seemingly vanished from the earth and all its memories.
52
During the very months Montague was the tabloids’ darling, Larry had his hands full with two remarkable publicity ventures.
The second of them, a homecoming event, was a flawless coup that secured forever Bing’s standing as Spokane’s hometown boy.
The first, however, was a fiasco. At the heart of the matter was the longest press release ever written about a film star:
a 207-page biography,
Bing,
published in the spring of 1937, written by Ted and Larry Crosby, with an unattributed assist from Bing.
Poor Ted: life had not emulated the moral logic of his undergraduate stories. He married Hazel Nieman at twenty-four, and
they had three daughters, including twins; it may or may not speak to the piety of his home that one of the latter entered
the Holy Names order at eighteen, as Sister M. Catherine Joan.
53
Ted was a likable, hardworking family man, the only sibling to remain in Spokane, where he continued to harbor his long-standing
ambition to write. He put his abilities to use as publicist for Washington Water Power but longed for a place in show business;
to that end, he wrote songs and stories and kept on the lookout for talent he could promote. All his efforts in those areas
came to nothing, while his brother seemed to fall upward from peak to peak, a charmed soul, living the life Ted had fantasized
about in his college tales.
The book project began surprisingly early, in Bing’s career, in late 1934 or early 1935. For Ted it held the promise of additional
income and the chance to publish — to mine the one commercial subject available to him. For a while he worked on the book
alone, without input from Bing’s office, though he kept Larry and Bing informed of his progress. At the same time, he was
trying to interest Bing in various business ventures, soliciting him for seed money. Bing demurred, on one occasion telling
him he could not afford the risk, as he was between contracts and had no guarantee of his standing in the coming year. Then
a proposal fell into Bing’s lap that he extended to Ted.
Collier’s
had approached Grover Jones, a contributor to the magazine and one of the most resourceful of Paramount’s screenwriters
(The Virginian, Trouble in Paradise, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Milky Way),
about writing a three-part life of Bing.
54
Paramount, perhaps influenced by the labors of its publicity staff, was thinking along similar lines. In a letter that speaks
to Hollywood’s — and his — cavalier approach to biographical accuracy, Bing wrote Ted:
Inasmuch as the studio has expressed a desire to make a picture covering my career, I see how we can mutually profit in the
following manner. Before the articles in
Collier’s
are released, Jones proposes to get a title okayed by the company. After the story appears there is no reason why it can’t
be sold to Paramount for $15,000 or even $20,000, as a starring vehicle for me, and I can urge its purchase…. I figure if
[Grover] could take this material you are writing and revise and rewrite to suit his purposes, release it to
Collier’s,
withholding, of course, picture and book rights, we would be in a much better position to collect on the latter two. Of course,
any money coming to me I would assign to you. But for the business angle of the whole thing, I should appear. This deal with
Collier’s
is already set, so your chance is on picture and book rights, where I have every reasonable belief you would be successful.
I have no clear recollection of the interesting events prior to my going into show business and naturally rely on your material
to supply these. What has happened in the meantime he and I can concoct. He plans the whole thing in story form, not an article,
and in real down-to-earth fashion, not the stilted biographical things that have appeared in the various film and radio magazines.
I would like to try and arrange the thing so some of the professional credit redounds to you, in addition to the financial
gain for yourself if everything works out as planned.
What he is interested in chiefly are the minor incidents that happened around Spokane, and in school, that are real and interesting.
These to be fictionized and colored a bit, and woven into a good tight story that avoids the cut and dried and makes good
reading. The only parts of the yarn that need to be factual are the high points, such as marriage, the children, places of
employment etc.
55
The film and the article fell through —
Collier’s
instead published “The Kid from Spokane” by Quentin Reynolds
56
— but the book took on a life of its own, as Ted composed first drafts and mailed them to Larry, who submitted them to Bing
and returned the revised pages to Ted.
57
“I am mailing you 7 chapters of the book as we have finally completed them,” Larry wrote Ted in April 1935, the month the
Quentin Reynolds story ran.
58
“Bing has just finished one more — so I am having to keep after him to get them out.”
59
Bing had recently wrapped
Misissippi
and, Larry confided, “he is tired of everything but horses & golf.”
60
Yet somehow he found the energy to add the book to his regimen of obligations.
While the book progressed, Ted continued to pitch various enterprises, involving mining, medicine, and other projects for
which he requested capital. Larry wrote him that Bing would be unable to underwrite them, as “his surplus money” was invested
in
Pennies from Heaven.
61
When Ted asked Bing to do a broadcast endorsing one venture, Larry explained that even if Bing donated his time, the cost
of the orchestra and the station made it impractical. Ted put most of his energy into songwriting and a singer named Marion
Boyle. He mailed a slew of songs to Larry, along with a stream of advice: “The enclosed ‘Don’t Look Behind You’ is, I think,
a natural, for a picture…. Of the
Pennies from Heaven
numbers I liked, ‘So Do I’ and ‘Have a Heart’… Saw
Sailor Beware
the other night — very punk. Good thing Bing didn’t get stuck to do that…. If a Mrs. Brosius calls to see you about some
tunes she has, use your judgment.”
62
Larry submitted Ted’s songs to Bing’s publishing company, Select; when they were returned, Ted suggested other publishers
and asked Larry whether Bing would sing one on the air. Their father told Ted that Bing had tried to fit one into a broadcast
but was stopped by the sponsor. Ted persevered: “Any chance of my writing a story for a picture for him? Advise and will go
to work.”
63
Larry explained that his
ideas were not powerful enough to “supplant what the writers on salary can turn out.”
64
Months later Ted made demos of his own songs, and Larry sent them to Select’s president, George Joy, who wrote back, “I went
over those records of your brother Ted’s songs, and there are a couple among them that sound pretty fair, but… we’ve got to
get outstanding material; we cannot take just ordinary songs because of the opposition we are up against.” He mentioned Berlin,
Gershwin, and Porter and concluded, “Pass this along to Ted and tell him that I do hope one of these days we can get together
with him on a song of his.”
65
Larry made a deal to syndicate the book in London, payment to be made when the finished manuscript was delivered, and had
a rough draft printed for Bing’s approval. While Ted eagerly waited for the English check, Bing lingered over two chapters.
Larry assured him, “Bing is now going over the book — & has made some good changes. I have plenty offers — & hope to have
good news soon.”
66
With
Collier’s
out of the picture, Larry tried the
Saturday Evening Post,
the weekly that sixteen years later enjoyed the best sales figures in its history serializing Bing’s
Call Me Lucky.
For now, it preferred to commission an original Bing story, by humorist H. Allen Smith. In January 1937 Harry wrote Ted,
“Flash:
Believe it or not,
Bing finished the last chapter of the story the other day and it’s been mailed ….”
67
Proofs were rushed to Ted.
By March copies of
Bing
were available in two editions. Larry and Ted had misguidedly decided to publish and distribute it themselves, through the
Bolton Printing Company. They produced a paperback version that Larry sold virtually at cost, for a dollar, through direct
mail; the profit margin was too small to permit anything else. A two-dollar edition was bound in blue felt, with just the
title,
Bing,
embossed in gold on the cover. They soon learned the vagaries of vanity publishing. “Response to cloth slow, but expect more
when publicity breaks,” Larry wrote Ted.
68
A department store in Spokane bought a hundred copies for a window display. By April they knew the book had flopped. “Even
in my most conservative moments,” Larry confessed, “I would have gambled the 100 copies wouldn’t last there over a week.”
69
They sold no more than a hundred copies at the Los Angeles theater showing Bing’s latest film,
Waikiki Wedding.
“There isn’t enough margin to place it in bookstores until the cost is cut in half on
the second run,” concluded Larry. “Besides they want a three-month consignment which is tough to carry.”
70
He cautioned Ted not to buy a ranch.
They sold a total of 400 copies in the first weeks, mostly through fan mail, yet Larry put on a show for a reporter from England’s
Gramophone,
who visited Crosby, Inc.’s three-story office building at 9028—30 Sunset Boulevard. He asked Larry if he thought fans would
buy the book. “Larry led me to another part of the office to see the organization which deals with Bing’s fan mail. I questioned
the success of this project no longer. Bing’s fan mail arrives in sacks from every part of the world.”
71
An article in
Look
that year reported the number of letters as 10,000 per month.
72
Yet the books did not move. Larry could not distribute them to stores or afford the advertising that would have alerted fans
who bought every magazine with Bing’s picture on the cover. In the end, he asked Kraft and Paramount to accept the books as
premiums: “It should make as good a theater give-away as crockery and the other junk they put out on grocery nights.”
73
Paramount enclosed the book in
Double or Nothing
press packages in September, with the suggestion that theaters use it as an inducement. Decca mailed inserts, offering the
book to dealers at a 25 percent discount.