Bing Crosby

1

MEANWHILE

Shortly before supper on an evening near the close of 1940, the thirty-seven-year-old Bing Crosby entered the palatial yet intimate home he had built a few years before at 10500 Camarillo Street, in North Hollywood’s Toluca Lake district, and stepped into a too-familiar din. Turning the latch, he could hear his wife, Dixie, a few weeks into her twenty-ninth year, upstairs ranting at their four sons in a pitch verging on hysteria. He climbed the grand staircase that spiraled up to the first-landing bedrooms and stepped down the three shallow treads into Dixie’s dressing area. Sitting upright on a settee, she had the boys arrayed at her feet: seven-year-old Gary, the five-year-old twins, Phillip and Dennis, the not-quite-three-year-old Lindsay. She turned, disrupted and dazed, to her husband of ten years and instantly fell silent. Without a word, he put one arm around her back and the other beneath her legs, gently lifted her, and carried her to the bed.²

It was not the final straw, just one of many that weighed him down, triggering his resolve to make a startling change in his picture-perfect life—a life symbolized in magazine stories and on a bestselling postcard depicting their twenty-room Georgian Colonial. Fronted by a six-pillar colonnade with balconied entablature, it evoked Mount Vernon as modified by the architect of Tara. Beyond the showcase entrance hall, it served primarily as a doggedly private retreat where show business and its machinations could be held at bay. At the same time, it walled in Dixie’s growing dependence on alcohol, which made the retreat less than a haven.

Bing spent that day, as he did most of December, at Paramount Pictures competing with Bob Hope for wisecracks on the set of Road to Zanzibar. As usual, as the skies cleared (record-breaking rains drenched Los Angeles all season), he stopped at Lakeside to play nine or more holes before returning home to whatever new calamity awaited him. He kept his restlessness to himself. Crosby appeared to almost everyone as the most creditable of entertainers, his voice and personality incarnating continuity in volatile times, at once princely and familiar, imperturbable. Road to Singapore, his biggest picture yet, had kicked his career onto a new plateau in early 1940, and in the fall he dominated recording sales with three straight number one hits (“Sierra Sue,” “Trade Winds,” and “Only Forever”), a return to form after a relatively sluggish 1939. His weekly radio hour, Kraft Music Hall (KMH), placed reliably in the top ten of network programs. He wore his success blithely. His private life was thought to be idyllic and deserved. His wife, formerly a promising star in her own right, epitomized a rare combination: Hollywood-beautiful and girl-next-door-approachable. She was smart, charming, droll, athletic, fiercely loyal, and sometimes as sharp as a thorn—in the words of one besotted admirer, “altogether nifty.”³

Bing lived like a king with relatively disciplined appetites. He didn’t own a plane, a yacht, or a Rolls; had never been to Europe; kept no mistresses in hidden-away apartments; and thus far had erected no statelier mansions than the monument of Americana on Camarillo. At Rancho Santa Fe, California, where he ran a thoroughbred farm and administered a pro-am golf tournament, he surprised his trainers by arriving at the stables with the rosy fingers of dawn. He knew horses almost as well as they did. Paramount reproached him for working alongside his laborers when he renovated the property, since it meant the makeup department had to disguise his blistered hands. He loved singing, which had made him famous; golf and fishing, which he could well afford; and thoroughbred racing, which strained his holdings, not just because of the buying and training of horses and the maintenance of a stable, but because of the wagers he usually lost. Still, he had no addictions beyond the need to keep busy and no desire to flaunt the proof of his achievements. He owned a vast wardrobe, a hundred or so suits, but no one could tell that from his willful informality. He developed a head for business and a tight fist, but he remained a rich man with working-class manners, preferring Hawaiian shirts and khakis to full dress, and a library of books, recordings, and pipes to an entourage. Impatient with introspection, he communicated in a language of joking camaraderie: stoic, manly, rarely nostalgic, never sentimental, and often flippant. Admired for his intelligence, quick wit, and ability to converse about anything, he could not always resist the urge to sermonize. He was a devout Catholic, confident, independent, obstinate, and unaffectedly modest.

As Dixie’s bouts of drunkenness increased, the Crosbys appeared in public often enough to allay rumors of marital discord, or at least restrict them to the Hollywood community, where they were rife. A week at El Mirador in Palm Springs; a trip to Mamaroneck, New York, when Bing competed in the U.S. Amateur Open Golf Championship; a party at Café La Maze the day his horse Don Mike finished first in the $10,000 handicap at Santa Anita; various restaurants and nightclubs; a boxing match. They were spotted at a corner table at Perino’s Sky Room quietly singing to each other like young lovebirds as the John Kirby Sextet played songs from Bing’s pictures. Dixie’s friends noticed her growing reclusiveness. Her sons observed that at times she slurred her words. She often isolated herself in her room, unavailable to them. She fainted more than once. When she collapsed in the upstairs hallway, the housekeeper, who usually covered Dixie’s tracks, shooed the boys away. Bing later assured them she was fine. No need to worry.

Not until four or five years later did Gary draw the connection between his mother’s failings and alcoholism, a subject that people in those years tended to ignore, deny, or burlesque. “I’ll tell you something about my mother,” said Gary, whose own life and career were torpedoed by alcoholism. “For my mother to get up on that stage, she would have to drink. Because she was an alcoholic from birth, I don’t care what anybody says. She had no self-esteem, didn’t think she was pretty, didn’t think she was anything. And it didn’t get easier when she walked away from her career. When you feel that way, you’ve got to have something to get out there.”⁴

This was the era—not yet sobered from the binge that was Prohibition—when W. C. Fields enjoyed his last tottering hurrahs, when stolid MGM tuned its Thin Man franchise to the rattle of a martini shaker, and when Craig Rice, now forgotten but then characterized as the Dorothy Parker of detective fiction, wrote comical mysteries solved in a mist of rye and gin that landed her on the cover of Time. The Twelve Steps as framed by Alcoholics Anonymous had yet to find much traction. Its membership barely topped one hundred. Among those most skeptical about classifying excessive drinking as an infirmity were the medical men in the Crosby circle. The surgeon Arnold Stevens, a family friend and himself an alcoholic, told Dixie, “You’re very run down,” and advised brandy and milk. Dixie once told a columnist that during her pregnancies, brandy was all she could keep down. Decades after her death, which occurred three days before her forty-first birthday, her internist George “Jud” Hummer, who practiced in the Crosby Building on Sunset Boulevard and counted himself and his wife among Dixie’s dearest friends, refused to concede she had had a drinking problem. Joseph Harris, her obstetrician at Cedars of Lebanon who took her through three pregnancies, never thought—any more than most of his colleagues would have—to warn her of prenatal drinking. The term fetal alcohol syndrome didn’t appear until 1963.⁵

An exception was a psychiatrist, Anthony Sturdevant, who specialized in young people but saw Dixie regularly in the Crosby home. For short periods, he kept her off the booze. Yet seeing a psychiatrist had its own stigma, generating as much suspicion as alcoholism. Patients had to endure the stereotypes attached to analysis: presumptions of weakness, dark undercurrents, madness, electroshock. Bing encouraged Dr. Sturdevant’s ministrations, though they ultimately failed.⁶ A paradigm of self-discipline who thought depression treatable by exertion of will, Bing had proved by example that drinking was merely a bad habit. You just stopped, or you moderated it when it got out of hand. “He is the only one in the family I never saw drunk,” Gary marveled.⁷

Yet ten years earlier, Bing drank his way through the speakeasies of one city after another, waking in strange bedrooms, bathrooms, hotels, cafés, under tables, and failing to show for professional and personal engagements, incurring suits, threats, dismissals. He joked about leaving a “trail of broken bottles,” not hearts, after years on tour with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra in that woozy interval before he established his name on radio and in movies. Dixie forced him to reform. When her arguments and pleas had no effect, six months into their 1930 marriage, she flew to Agua Caliente and threatened a divorce. He pursued her and promised to turn his life around. Despite occasional missteps, he exceeded everyone’s expectations. His career flourished, as did the marriage. As far as the public knew, their union was not merely solid, it was exemplary, an article of faith, like the widely held belief that FDR stood on his own two legs or that George VI was an adept orator.⁸

In the spring of 1940, millions of Hearst readers opened the American Weekly, a Sunday supplement, to “Those Hollywood Divorces,” by Adela Rogers St. Johns. A Hollywood insider, St. Johns had a reputation for peeling away the tinsel; in truth, she merrily shoveled it on. This week her mission was to praise those couples who are “so happy they never make news” (the Harold Lloyds, the James Cagneys, the Crosbys) and to refute the argument that a woman’s devotion to her career poisons love. Her “research into the matter” included a discussion with Joan Crawford, “the most honest woman I have ever known,” who revealed that her marriage to Franchot Tone foundered not on the shoals of mutual careerism but because her relentless domesticity, ironing shirts and darning socks, got on his nerves. St. Johns then reversed her defense of working women by describing the “ideal” marriage of the Crosbys, which friends credited to the fact that Dixie had “abandoned her performing career and devoted herself entirely to being a good wife and mother.”⁹

That fall, Life ran a similar (unsigned) article, “The New Hollywood,” in which the stars “build homes, live quietly and raise children.” This new housebroken Hollywood was illustrated by a picture of the serene Crosbys: Baby Lindsay, seated on Bing’s lap, is turning to exchange a smile with his mother, who is standing behind Bing; surrounding them are the older boys, in matching uniforms. (“Like many movie children, they go to a military school.”) A caption acknowledges the hoary Hollywood precept that women prefer their matinee idols to be unmarried. “Bing Crosby’s family is perhaps Hollywood’s best. This rare photograph, taken by George Strock, would have been inconceivable ten years ago, when it would have wrecked an actor’s career. Besides being Hollywood’s proudest father, Bing runs a horse ranch, a race track, and an office building.”¹⁰

The Paramount Pictures publicity engine, with which Crosby seldom cooperated (hence the rarity of Life’s photograph), pushed this narrative hard. Fans seeking parenting advice wrote him letters, and Bing, a meticulous correspondent, responded. He shared an anecdote with a member of the Catholic Sportsman’s Guild: “One time I found it necessary to spank my oldest boy, Gary, age six, and afterward when I was attempting to make up with him, he said, ‘I’m going to get a farm and have a lot of pigs and make you take care of the pigs.’ Whereupon I said, ‘I’m going to get a farm and on it I’m going to have a lot of skunks.’ ‘Doggone,’ said Gary, ‘I forgot about skunks.’” To another correspondent, Bing wrote of his boys: “So far in their lives we have tried to make them self-reliant and have tried to instill in them a correct appreciation of values, and a knowledge of the difficulties necessary to attain financial security.”¹¹

A week or so into the new year of 1941, shortly after Bing carried her to her bed, Dixie drove the six blocks from Camarillo Street to Kitty Sexton’s house on Cartwright Street to tell her devoted friend that Bing had demanded a divorce. She had hardly made it through the door before breaking down. Bing had it all planned, she explained, weeping. He’d instructed her to go to Sun Valley with the younger children and Kitty—he trusted only Kitty to travel with her—in order to establish residency and expedite the proceedings.