Modern Screen (Jul-Dec 1945)

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He forgot about time and the next thing he knew it was Monday night and he was a long stretch away from the bandstand at the Cocoanut Grove. He didn't show up until Tuesday night and the management was hopping mad. He got docked a week's salary for playing hookey. That made him sore. Too soon afterwards he repeated the week-end flyer at Palm Springs and this time three days rolled by before Bing could forget his fun. He got docked more severely. He burned up. He took to nipping on the job and that was bad. For the first time in his life he started glooming around with his head in a sack of woe. The only thing that seemed to make sense to him was Dixie Lee. He called her up and did a little crying on her shoulder. He was busted and in hot water with his job. A fine time to propose, he said, but Dixie wasn't listening to such talk. "What difference does that make?" she pointed out. "We love each other, don't we?" So the next day at the Blessed Sacrament Church on Sunset Boulevard, Bing signed the best contract of his life. The Rhythm Boys were there, Al and Harry, and of course brother Ev and his wife. Dixie's friend, Sue Carol, provided the honeymoon touch. She moved out of her big home up in the Los Feliz section of Hollywood (where she lives today with her husband, Alan Ladd) and turned it over to the honeymooners. In other respects, it was a funny honeymoon. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And no kidding. They all turned up for Bing in the next few days. He got signed to his new job making crooning shorts for Mack Sennett, $750 per copy, for a series of five. He was in pictures. He was also out of the Cocoanut Grove. All the bad feeling exploded there one day and the Rhythm Boys, to a man — Bing, Harry and Al — walked out on their jobs. Maybe they just beat the Grove to the punch, before they got fired. Anyway, that was fini, washed up, kaput. The musicians union blacklisted them for jumping their job. Bing had his movie contract to keep him warm. Al and Harry drifted off to greener fields of music. At last, it was Bing Crosby on his own — but not alone. He had Dixie. When the old gang suggested a bender Bing took to grinning and yanking his thumb Dixie's way. "Can't," he'd say, "I got a keeper now." Bing had another keeper besides Dixie. More and more his brother Everett was busying himself with Bing's affairs. The business talent that was to make him Bing's official manager from then on was clicking away in Ev's brain. He had more faith in Bing's greatness than Bing himself and he wasn't backward about it. He packed up the two best Crosby records, "It Must Be True" and "I Surrender, Dear" and shipped them both to New York broadcasting home offices, NBC and Columbia. He said, not a bit bashfully, that Bing could be persuaded to sing on a coast-to-coast hook-up. When the replies came back, "Bring him here for an audition," Ev hurried with the good news to Bing, on the set at Mack Sennett's. "Go 'way, Boy," he told Ev, "you bother me." But the Sennett shorts were winding up and Dixie was on studio layoff. She didn't have much trouble talking him into having a go at it. They made it a family trip to Manhattan with Bing and Dixie and Ev and his wife, Naomi. Bing never had a nerve in his body at the auditions. He insisted on showing Dixie the town, and dropped off the wagon at speaks, but when he sang for the radio chain chiefs with his old guitar-playing pal, Eddie Lang, accompanying, he was in, a la Crosby, with no trouble at all. Ev took the best offer and Columbia signed Bing for a national sustaining spot — $600 a week. When Ev got the good news he chased around over to the hotel and found Bing sitting around in wet clothes, eating ice cream. They celebrated, the whole crew. But Bing should have stood in bed. Not until the day before the big broadcast did he notice anything. Then, running through a number, his voice cracked on him. He tried again but this time it wouldn't even warble. They called in a doctor. He took a look at Bing's throat. "H-m-m-m-m," he said. "You say you're to sing tomorrow?" "Sure," wheezed Bing. "You're going to stay in bed tomorrow," said the doctor, "and keep your mouth closed. You've strained your vocal chords and caught cold at the same time." Bing thought of the air-chilled rehearsal rooms and the way he'd been yelling in the rain around the wet golf course. lucky jinx . . . "That's out," he croaked. He explained what the radio show meant to him: Just his whole future, that's all. The doctor shrugged. "Impossible," he said, "you've already got little bumps on your chords, scars, blisters— if you strain them in this condition they'll stay there and you might lose your voice for keeps." The next day Bing tried to sing again. He still sounded like a frog with asthma. He and Ev walked glomily back to the hotel. Bing went to his room. After a couple of hours, Ev had a disturbing hunch. He knocked on Bing's door — no answer. The door was unlocked, he walked in. There was a note on the dresser. "Cancel the contract," Bing had written. "I've given it the works and I guess it's no go." Ev still has that note. Whenever Bing gets out of line he reads it to him. Ev had spine-chilling visions of Bing drowning his woes in drink, as the gang sat around the hotel gloomily. Along about evening in walked Bing, whistling merrily, sober as a judge. He'd been walking around New York, having a battle with himself. Nobody said anything. Bing yawned, "Doctors don't know much, do they? Besides, I've already wired home about the show and what'll they say if I yellow out on 'em? You didn't cancel that contract, did you?" "No," said Everett. Next day Bing felt better but his voice was still crackly. Freddie Rich and the orchestra were ready for him when he showed up at the studio. He babied his voice, running through the numbers for timing as the Columbia eyebrows shot up like balloons. Was this raspy rattler the guy they'd heard three days ago? Back of the glass Ev, Dixie and Naomi held their breaths. The red light flashed. There was Bing at the mike crooning and whistling his melodies out just as easily as if he'd stepped up on the stage at the Cocoanut Grove with a couple of shots under his belt, only this time he had only a cold to keep him warm. Maybe his tone was husky but if it was that was all the better. Typically Bing, everything that happened happened for the best. The nodes never went away, as the doctor predicted. They're still hanging around on Bing