This review originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.
BING CROSBY: A Pocketful of Dreams - The Early Years, 1903-1940
By Gary Giddins
Back Bay Books, 736 pp., $17.95 paperback
Strange to say, Bing Crosby needs this biography. Other major white male jazz/pop singers who were eclipsed in the rock revolution of the '60s managed to re-emerge. Frank Sinatra's bad-boy behavior kept him hot. Tony Bennett hung with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and got certified as hip by the MTV generation. Even Mel Tormé benefited from Harry Anderson's worship of him on ''Night Court.'' Of course, they were around to help revive their reputations, while Crosby, who created the style of singing that made them famous, died in 1977. So Crosby got dismissed as a nostalgia throwback, like the Andrews Sisters, or a bland middle-of-the-roader, like Perry Como. At worst, he was regarded as a cultural imperialist who made his fortune by ripping off black musical idiom and making it palatable for white audiences. Or he was just that old guy who played golf -- before Tiger Woods made golf cool.
Gary Giddins' task, then, is to persuade us not only that Crosby was ''the most influential and successful popular performer in the first half of the twentieth century'' but also that the work he left behind him deserves our continued respect, admiration and emulation. This exhaustive -- and occasionally exhausting -- biography takes us up to 1940; Giddins plans to tell the rest of the story in another volume. But the Crosby of the '30s is the essential Bing Crosby, the one whose achievement was summarized by bandleader/clarinetist Artie Shaw: ''He really is the first American jazz singer in the white world.''
It was a very white world in which Crosby grew up. He was born in Tacoma, Wash., and raised in Spokane, and on his father's side, he could trace his lineage back to passengers on the Mayflower. His mother's Irish-Catholic heritage and religion prevailed over his father's, however: Bing was raised a Catholic and attended the Jesuit-run Gonzaga High School and Gonzaga University. But he dropped out of law school at Gonzaga and headed for Los Angeles with a friend, Al Rinker, whose sister, the singer Mildred Bailey, was breaking into show business.
The vaudeville duo of Crosby and Rinker became a trio, the Rhythm Boys, with the addition of Harry Barris, and soon they were featured performers with Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. In 1930, the Rhythm Boys appeared in the movie ''King of Jazz,'' a showcase for Whiteman that flopped but launched Crosby's film career.
The association with Whiteman, the self-styled King of Jazz, does nothing to help Crosby with either those who regard him as a cultural imperialist or those who fail to think of him as a jazz innovator. Whiteman's ''jazz'' was slickly orchestrated stuff, not the ebullient, improvisatory music we think of as echt jazz. But Giddins is content to face the simple fact: ''African-American innovations metamorphose into American popular culture when white performers learn to mimic black ones.'' Crosby, under Whiteman's aegis, became ''the first in a long line of white musicians who popularized real black music . . . for a white public. This was ten years before Benny Goodman launched the Swing Era, thirty years before Elvis rocked.''
It's good to remember that Crosby was raised in an era when the minstrel show and blackface performers like Al Jolson were tolerated. Today we cringe at production numbers such as ''Abraham'' in the 1942 movie ''Holiday Inn.'' In it, a blacked-up Crosby and company sing the praises of the Great Emancipator for an all-white audience, while his African-American cook sits on the back porch and sings to her children about how Lincoln freed the ''darkies.'' But as Giddins points out, Crosby also made an effort to integrate black performers such as Louis Armstrong into his films, and was frustrated: Armstrong's performance in the 1938 film ''Doctor Rhythm'' was cut in deference to Southern audiences. Crosby repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Armstrong, calling him ''the greatest pop singer in the world that ever was and ever will be forever and ever.'' The easy camaraderie in the duets Armstrong and Crosby recorded is evidence that the tribute was genuine -- and genuinely appreciated.
Of course, sounding genuine was Crosby's forte. There has been no surer master of the media -- from recordings to radio to film and TV -- in which he appeared. ''More than any other performer,'' Giddins observes, ''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 his talents.''
He had the good luck to be starting his career just as recording shifted from acoustical to electrical reproduction of music. Before the development of the microphone, recording artists had to bellow into great horns -- a technology unsuited for the subtlety and intimacy characteristic of a performer like Crosby. Then came radio, on which the bright, high sound of the tenor was less welcome than a mellow baritone like Crosby's: ''Higher voices are better for reaching theater balconies, but lower ones are more appealing in living rooms,'' Giddins notes.
Crosby took each medium and shaped an agreeable persona for it. Like no singer before him, he made singing seem as natural as speaking. The voice that people heard on records and the radio had established his sex appeal, so when he moved into film it didn't matter that he was balding, paunchy and jug-eared. Moreover, he resisted Hollywood's efforts to make him conform to conventional ideas of good looks -- once he established himself at the box office, he rejected the practice of gluing back his ears, and chose to wear hats rather than toupees to cover his bald spots.
Giddins is one of the country's foremost jazz critics, so it's no surprise that his detailed accounts of Crosby's recordings are sensitive and illuminating. He succeeds brilliantly in his chief task of persuading us of Crosby's worth as a performer. But he's also a masterly biographer -- he has written about Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker as well -- who compiles an astonishing amount of information and turns it into a readable narrative. Admittedly, there are some boggy spots -- I learned more about the making of movies like ''Waikiki Wedding'' than I really needed to know. Giddins also tends to lose sight of the off-mike Crosby -- the husband and father -- in his focus on Crosby at work. We learn that Crosby got his drinking problem under control, but that his first wife, Dixie, didn't, and we begin to sense that there are problems at home -- but then we're off on the road with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour again.
And sometimes Giddins' attempts to summarize Crosby's importance bring him perilously close to cheerleading: ''No other pop icon has ever been so thoroughly, lovingly liked -- liked and trusted. Bing's naturalness made him credible to all, regardless of region, religion, race, or gender. He was our most authentic chameleon, mirroring successive eras -- through Prohibition, depression, war, anxiety, and affluence -- without ever being dramatic about it. He was discreet and steady. He was family.''
That was the image, at least. After Crosby's death in 1977, the iconoclasts, including his son Gary, went to work on biographies whose allegations of abuse and infidelity tarnished his reputation as husband and father. But Giddins' biography is focused on how Crosby created a persona, and only to a lesser extent on what lay behind the mask. Rehabilitating Crosby's artistic reputation is higher on Giddins' agenda than sorting through the dirty laundry, but if he takes the story beyond 1940, things will doubtless have to come out in the wash.
If you ever need a definition of sprezzatura, just take a look at these two pros performing Cole Porter’s “Well, Did You Evah?” in “High Society”:
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