Bing Crosby

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Bing Crosby
Bing Crosby in the 1956 motion picture High Society
Bing Crosby in the 1956 motion picture High Society
Background information
Birth name Harry Lillis Crosby
Born May 3, 1903, Tacoma, Washington, United States
Died October 14, 1977, Madrid, Spain
Genre(s) Jazz
Pop standards
Dixieland
Years active 1926–1977
Label(s) Brunswick
Decca
Reprise
RCA Victor
Verve
United Artists
Website Internet Museum

Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby (May 3, 1903 – October 14, 1977) was an American singer and actor whose career lasted from 1926 until his death in 1977.

The first true multi-media star, Bing Crosby's influence on popular culture and popular music is enormous -- from 1934 to 1954 he held a nearly unrivaled command of record sales, radio ratings and motion picture grosses. He is usually considered to be a member of popular music's "holy trinity" of ultra-icons, alongside Elvis Presley and The Beatles,1 and is currently the most electronically recorded human voice in history (Schwartz, 1995) [1]

Crosby is also credited as being the major inspiration for most of the male singers that followed him, including the likes of Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Dean Martin. Tony Bennett summed up Crosby's impact, stating, "Bing created a culture. He contributed more to popular music than any other person - he molded popular music. Every singer in the business has taken something from Crosby. Every male singer has a Bing Crosby idiosyncrasy."1

Yank magazine recognized Crosby as the person who had done the most for American GI morale during World War II[2] and, during his peak years, around 1948, polls declared him the "most admired man alive" ahead of Jackie Robinson and The Pope. (Philadelphia Courier, 22 November 1947) Also during 1948, the Music Digest estimated that Crosby recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music.[3]

Crosby also exerted a massive influence on the development of the postwar recording industry. In 1947 he invested US$50,000 in the Ampex company, which developed the world's first commercial reel-to-reel tape recorder, and Crosby became the first performer in the world to prerecord his radio shows and master his commercial recordings on magnetic tape. He gave one of the first Ampex Model 200 recorders to his friend, musician Les Paul, which led directly to Paul's invention of multitrack recording. He was, along with Frank Sinatra, one of the principal backers behind the famous United Western Recorders studio complex in Los Angeles.

In 1962, Crosby was the first person to receive the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Harry Lillis Crosby was born in Tacoma, Washington on May 3, 1903 in a house that his father built (1112 North J Street, Tacoma, Washington). His family later moved to Spokane, Washington in 1906 to find work. He was the fourth of seven children - five boys Larry (1895-1975), Everett (born 1896), Ted (born 1900), Harry (born 1903) and Bob (1913-1993) and two girls Catherine (born 1905) and Mary Rose (born 1907) - born to English-American Harry Lowe Crosby (1871-1950), a bookkeeper and Irish-American Catherine Harrigan (1873-1964), (affectionately known as Kate), the daughter of a builder from County Mayo in Ireland. His paternal ancestors Thomas Prence and Patience Brewster were born in England and immigrated to the U.S. in the 17th century; Brewster's family came over on the Mayflower.

It should be noted that Bing Crosby had no birth certificate and that his birth date was shrouded in mystery until his childhood Roman Catholic church in Tacoma, Washington, released the baptismal records that revealed his date of birth.

In 1910 Crosby was forever renamed. The six-year-old Harry Lillis discovered a full page feature in the Sunday edition of Spokesman-Review, "The Bingville Bugle." The "Bugle," written by humorist Newton Newkirk, was a parody of a hillbilly newsletter complete with gossipy tidbits, minstrel quips, creative spelling and mock ads. A neighbor, 15-year-old Valentine Hobart, shared Crosby's enthusiasm for "The Bugle," and noting Crosby's laugh, took a liking to him and called him Bingo from Bingville. The last vowel was dropped and the name shortened to Bing, which stuck.

In 1917 Crosby took a summer job as property boy at Spokane's "Auditorium" where he witnessed some of the finest acts of the day, including a blackface performer named Al Jolson who spellbound Crosby with his ad-libbing and spoofs of Hawaiian songs that brought down the house. Crosby would later say that, "To me, he was the greatest entertainer who ever lived."

Bing enrolled in the Jesuit-run Gonzaga College in Spokane, Washington in the fall of 1920 with the intent to become a lawyer. He maintained a B+ average. While in Gonzaga he sent away for a set of mail order drums. After much practice he soon became good enough and was invited to join a local band which was made up of mostly local high school kids called the "Musicaladers," managed by one Al Rinker. He made so much money doing this he decided to drop out of school during his final year, to pursue a career in show business.

[edit] Popular success

[edit] Music

The Rhythm Boys Left To Right, Bing Crosby, Harry Barris and Al Rinker
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The Rhythm Boys Left To Right, Bing Crosby, Harry Barris and Al Rinker

In 1926, Crosby and his vocal duo partner Al Rinker caught the eye of Paul Whiteman, arguably the most famous bandleader at the time, while singing at Los Angeles Metropolitan Theatre. Hired for $150 a week, they made their debut on December 6, 1926 at the Tivoli Theatre in Chicago. Their first recording, "I've Got The Girl," issued by Columbia, did them no vocal favours as it sounded like they were singing in a key much too high for them. It was later revealed that the 78rpm was recorded at a speed faster than it should have been. As popular as the Crosby and Rinker duo was Whiteman added another member to the group, pianist and aspiring songwriter Harry Barris. As a result Whiteman dubbed them the Rhythm Boys and they joined the Whiteman vocal team, working and recording with Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey and Eddie Lang and singers Mildred Bailey and Hoagy Carmichael.

Crosby soon became the star attraction of the Rhythm Boys not to mention Whiteman's Band and in 1928 had his first Number one hit, a jazz influenced rendition of "Ol' Man River." However, his repeated youthful peccadilloes and growing dissatisfaction with Whiteman forced him to leave the band along with the Rhythm Boys and join the Gus Arnheim Orchestra. After signing with Brunswick and recording under Jack Kapp the Rhythm Boys were increasingly pushed to the background with the vocal emphasis on Bing, fellow Rhythm Boys Harry Barris did write most of Crosby’s subsequent hits including "At Your Command," "I Surrender Dear," and "Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams." However, shortly after this the members of the band had a falling out and split, setting the stage for Crosby's solo career.

As the 1930s unfolded it became clear that Bing was the number one man, vocally speaking. Ten of the top 50 songs for 1931 either featured Bing solo or with others. Apart from the short-lived "Battle of the Baritones" with Russ Columbo "Bing Was King" signing long term deals with Jack Kapp's new record company Decca and starring in his first full-length features, 1932's the Big Broadcast, the first of 55 such films of which he was top billed. He appeared in a total of 79 pictures.

Around this time Bing made his solo debut on Radio, co-starring with The Carl Fenton Orchestra on a popular CBS radio show and by 1936, replaced his former boss, Paul Whiteman, as the host of NBC's Kraft Music Hall, a weekly radio program where he would remain for the next ten years.

He was thus able to take popular singing beyond the kind of "belting" associated with a performer like Al Jolson, who had to reach the back seats in New York theatres without the aid of the microphone. With Crosby, as Henry Pleasants noted in The Great American Popular Singers, something new had entered American music, something that might be called "singing in American," with conversational ease. The oddity of this new sound led to the epithet "crooner."

Golfballs for the Scrap Rubber Drive during World War Two
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Golfballs for the Scrap Rubber Drive during World War Two

Crosby gave great emphasis to live appearances before American troops fighting in the European Theater. He also learned how to pronounce German from written scripts, and would read them in propaganda broadcasts intended for the German forces. The nickname "der Bingle" for him was understood to have become current among German listeners, and came to be used by his English-speaking fans. In a poll of U.S. troops at the close of WWII, Crosby topped the list as the person who did the most for G.I. morale (beating out President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, General Dwight Eisenhower and one Leslie Townes Hope)

Crosby's biggest musical hit was his recording of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" which he introduced through a 1941 Christmas-season radio broadcast and the movie Holiday Inn. Bing's recording hit the charts on 3 October 1942, and rose to #1 on 31 October, where it stayed for 11 weeks. In the following years Bing's recording hit the top-30 pop charts another 16 times, even topping the charts again in 1945 and January of '47. The song remains Bing's best-selling recording, and the best-selling single and best selling song of all time . In 1998 after a long absence, his 1947 version hit the charts in Britain, and as of 2006 remains the North American holiday-season standard. According to Guinness World Records, Bing Crosby's White Christmas has "sold over 100 million copies around the world, with at least 50 million sales as singles."[1]

[edit] Motion pictures

Bing Crosby at the 1944 Academy Awards with the Best Actor Oscar for Going My Way.
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Bing Crosby at the 1944 Academy Awards with the Best Actor Oscar for Going My Way.

According to ticket sales Bing Crosby is, at 1,077,900,000 tickets sold, the third most popular actor of all-time behind Clark Gable and John Wayne. [2] Crosby is also, according to Quigley Publishing Company's International Motion Picture Almanac, tied for second on the "All Time Number One Stars List" with three other actors - Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks and Burt Reynolds.[3] Crosby's most popular film, White Christmas, grossed $30 million in 1954, which when adjusted for inflation equals $233 million in 2004 dollars. [4] Crosby also won an Academy Award as Best Actor for Going My Way in 1944 and was critically acclaimed for his performance as an alcoholic entertainer in The Country Girl.

By the late 1950s, Crosby's popularity had peaked, and the adolescence of the baby boom generation began to affect record sales to younger customers. In 1960, Crosby starred in High Time, a collegiate comedy with Fabian and Tuesday Weld that foretold the emerging gap between older Crosby fans and a new generation of films and music.

[edit] Style

Bing Crosby perfected an idea that Al Jolson had hinted at, namely that the popular performer didn't have to limit himself to a mere series of shticks but could be a genuine artist - in this case, a musician. Before Crosby, art was art and pop was pop; Opera singers worried about staying in tune and reaching the upper balcony, Vaudevillians concerned themselves with their costumes and facial expressions. Crosby rendered the difference between the two irrelevant. Where eariler recording artists had displayed strictly one-dimensional attitudes, Crosby not only perfected the fully rounded persona, but brought with it the technical wherewithal of a true concert artist. Crosby projected with a majestic sense of intonation that afforded Tin Pan Alley the musical stature of European classics and a jazz influenced time that made him both the dominant voice of both the Jazz age and the Swing era. Crosby also elaborated on a further idea of Al Jolson's, one that Frank Sinatra would ultimately extend further: phrasing, or more specifically, the art of making a song's lyric ring true. "I used to tell (Sinatra) over and over," said Tommy Dorsey, "there's only one singer you ought to listen to and his name is Crosby. All that matters to him is the words, and that's the only thing that ought to for you too."

The greatest trick of Crosby’s virtuosity was covering it up. It is often said that Crosby made his singing and acting "look easy," or as if it was no work at all: he simply was the character he portrayed, and his singing, being a direct extension of conversation, came just as naturally to him as talking, or even breathing. Journalist Donald Freeman said of Crosby, "There is only one Bing Crosby and - the time has come now to face the issue squarely - he happens to be that unique, awesome creature, an artist."

[edit] Voice characteristics

Bing Crosby is usually considered to be among the most talented singers of his time. Crosby could, as musicologist J.T.H. Mize's asserts, "melt a tone away, scoop it flat and sliding up to the eventual pitch as a glissando, sometimes sting a note right on the button, and take diphthongs for long musical rides." J.T.H. Mize also inventoried the Crosby arsenal of vocal effects, including "interpolating pianissimo whistling variations, sometimes arpeggic, at other times trilling". While vocal critic Henry Pleasants states that "The octave B flat to B flat in Bing's voice at that time [1930s] is, to my ears, one of the loveliest I have heard in forty-five years of listening to baritones, both classical and popular. it dropped conspicuously in later years. Since the mid-1950s, Bing has been more comfortable in a bass range while maintaining a baritone quality, with the best octave being G to G, or even F to F. In a recording he made of 'Dardanella' with Louis Armstrong in 1960, he attacks lightly and easily on a low E flat. This is lower than most opera basses care to venture, and they tend to sound as if they were in the cellar when they get there." Mel Torme concurred with Henry Pleasants stating that "His (Bing Crosby) low notes could make your bass woofers beg for mercy."

[edit] Career statistics

Bing Crosby has sales statistics that would place him among the most popular and successful musical acts of the 20th century, and would also suggest that Bing Crosby played a central role in American cultural and musical history: 1,700 recordings, 383 of those in the top 30, and of those, 41 hit No. 1. For 15 years (1934, 1937, 1940, 1943-1954) he was among the top 10 in box office draw, and for five of those years (1944-49) he was the largest in the world. He sang four Academy Award-winning songs - "Sweet Leilani" (1937), "White Christmas" (1942), "Swinging on a Star" (1944), "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" (1951) - and won an acting Oscar for Going My Way (1944). He also collected 23 gold and platinum records in his career. It should be noted that Gold and platinum records did not come into existence until 1958, after which Crosby was considered retired. In 1962 Crosby became the first recipient of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, a list that now contains a plethora of musical legends. He has been inducted into the respective halls of fame for both radio and popular music. His music sales are estimated at between 500,000,000 (five hundred million) to 900,000,000 (nine hundred million). Bing is a member of that exclusive club of the biggest record sellers that include Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and The Beatles.

[edit] Entrepreneurship

[edit] Mass media

Bing Crosby's desire to pre-record his radio shows, combined with a dissatisfaction with the available aluminum recording disks, was a significant factor in the development of magnetic tape recording and the radio industry's adoption of it. He used his power to innovate new methods of reproducing himself. In 1946 he wanted to shift from live performance to recorded transcriptions for his weekly radio show on NBC sponsored by Kraft. But NBC and competitor CBS refused to allow recorded radio programs (except for advertisements).

The live production of radio shows was a deeply-established tradition reinforced by the musicians' union and ASCAP. The Mutual network, on the other hand, had pre-recorded some of its programs as early as the Summer 1938 run of The Shadow with Orson Welles. The new ABC network, formed out of the sale of the old NBC Blue network in 1943 to Edward Noble, the "Lifesaver King," was willing to join Mutual in breaking the tradition. It would pay Crosby $30,000 per week to produce a recorded show every Wednesday sponsored by Philco. He would also get $40,000 from 400 independent stations for the rights to broadcast the 60-minute show that was sent to them every Monday on three 16-inch aluminum discs that played 10 minutes per side at 33⅓ rpm. Crosby wanted to change to recorded production for several reasons. The legend that has been most often told is that it would give him more time for his golf game. And he did record his first Philco program in August 1947 so he could enter the Jasper National Park Invitational Gold Tournament in September when the new radio season was to start. But golf was not the most important reason.

Crosby was always an early riser and hard worker. He sought better quality through recording, not more spare time. He could eliminate mistakes and control the timing of performances. Because his own Bing Crosby Enterprises produced the show, he could purchase the latest and best sound equipment and arrange the microphones his way (mic placement had long been a hotly-debated issue in every recording studio since the beginning of the electrical era). No longer would he have to wear the hated toupee on his head previously required by CBS and NBC for his live audience shows (Bing preferred a hat). He could also record short promotions for his latest investment, the world's first frozen orange juice to be sold under the brand name Minute Maid.

Bing Crosby with the first US manufactured audio tape recorder, The Ampex Model 200, which was first used to record his radio show on April 25, 1948.
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Bing Crosby with the first US manufactured audio tape recorder, The Ampex Model 200, which was first used to record his radio show on April 25, 1948.

The transcription method however had problems. The 16-inch aluminum program discs were made from master discs running at 78 rpm and holding only 4 minutes per side. This presented editing and timing problems that often caused gaps or glitches in the flow of the 60-minute program. Also, the acetate surface coating of the aluminum discs was little better than the wax that Edison had used at the turn of the century, with the same limited dynamic range and frequency response. In June of 1947, Murdo MacKenzie of Crosby Enterprises saw a demonstration of the German Magnetophon that Jack Mullin had brought back from Radio Frankfurt with 50 reels of tape at the end of the war. This machine was one of the magnetic tape recorders that BASF and AEG had built in Germany starting in 1935. The ½ inch ferric-coated tape could record 20 minutes per reel of high-quality sound. Alexander M. Poniatoff ordered his Ampex company (founded in 1944 from his initials A.M.P. plus the starting letters of "excellence") to manufacture an improved version of the Magnetophone.

Bing Crosby hired Mullin and his German machine to start recording his Philco show in August 1947 with the same 50 reels of Farben magnetic tape that Mullin had found at a radio station at Bad Nauheim near Frankfurt while working for the U.S. Army Signals Unit. The crucial advantage was editing. As Bing wrote in his autobiography, "By using tape, I could do a thirty-five or forty-minute show, then edit it down to the twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes the program ran. In that way, we could take out jokes, gags, or situations that didn't play well and finish with only the prime meat of the show; the solid stuff that played big. We could also take out the songs that didn't sound good. It gave us a chance to first try a recording of the songs in the afternoon without an audience, then another one in front of a studio audience. We'd dub the one that came off best into the final transcription. It gave us a chance to ad lib as much as we wanted, knowing that excess ad libbing could be sliced from the final product. If I made a mistake in singing a song or in the script, I could have some fun with it, then retain any of the fun that sounded amusing." Mullin's 1976 memoir of these early days of experimental recording agrees with Bing's account: "In the evening, Crosby did the whole show before an audience. If he muffed a song then, the audience loved it - thought it was very funny - but we would have to take out the show version and put in one of the rehearsal takes. Sometimes, if Crosby was having fun with a song and not really working at it, we had to make it up out of two or three parts. This ad-lib way of working is commonplace in the recording studios today, but it was all new to us."

Crosby also invested US$50,000 in Ampex to produce more machines. In 1948, the second season of Philco shows was taped with the new Ampex Model 200 tape recorder (introduced in April) using the new Scotch 111 tape from the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M) company. Mullin explained that new techniques were invented on the Crosby show with these machines: "One time Bob Burns, the hillbilly comic, was on the show, and he threw in a few of his folksy farm stories, which of course were not in Bill Morrow's script. Today they wouldn't seem very off-color, but things were different on radio then. They got enormous laughs, which just went on and on. We couldn't use the jokes, but Bill asked us to save the laughs. A couple of weeks later he had a show that wasn't very funny, and he insisted that we put in the salvaged laughs. Thus the laugh-track was born." Crosby had launched the tape recorder revolution in America. In his 1950 film Mr. Music, Bing Crosby can be seen singing into one of the new Ampex tape recorders that reproduced his voice better than anything else. Also quick to adopt tape recording was his friend Bob Hope, who would make the famous "Road to..." films with Bing and Dorothy Lamour.

Mullin continued to work for Crosby to develop a videotape recorder. Television production was mostly live in its early years but Crosby wanted the same ability to record that he had achieved in radio. The Fireside Theater sponsored by Proctor and Gamble was his first television production for the 1950 season. Mullin had not yet succeeded with videotape, so Crosby filmed the series of 26-minute shows at the Hal Roach Studios. The "telefilms" were sent to television stations and projected into a camera using a film chain. This would be the same method used by Desi Arnaz in 1951 for the production of I Love Lucy, making Desilu the industry model for the independent syndication of filmed episodic series. Crosby did not remain a television producer but continued to finance the development of videotape. Mullin would demonstrate a blurry picture on December 30, 1952, but he was not able to solve the problem of high tape speed. It was the Ampex team led by Charles Ginsburg that made the first videotape recorder. Rather than speeding tape across fixed heads at 100 ips, Ginsburg used rotating heads to record at a slant on tape moving at only 15 ips. The quadruplex scan model VR-1000 was demonstrated at the NAB show in Chicago on April 14, 1956, and was an immediate success. Ampex made $4 million in sales during the NAB convention and by 1957 most TV production was done on videotape. Ampex developed a color videotape system in 1958 and recorded the spirited debate (dubbed the "Kitchen Debate") between Khrushchev and Nixon on a demonstration model at the Moscow trade Fair September 25, 1959. By this time, Crosby had sold his videotape interests to the 3M company and no longer played the role of tape recorder pioneer. Yet his contribution had been crucial. He had opened the door to Mullin's machine in 1948 and financed the early years of the Ampex company. The rapid spread of the tape recorder revolution was in no small measure caused by Crosby's efforts.

The decade following the end of World War II witnessed what has been called the "revolution in sound." The Decca Company introduced FFRR 78 rpm records (Full Frequency Range Recording) that had the finest frequency response (80-15,000 cps) of any recording process before magnetic tape recording. Decca's method of reducing the size of the groove and designing a delicate elliptical stylus to track on the sides of the groove would be the same innovation of the new microgroove process introduced by Columbia in 1948 on the new 33⅓ rpm LP vinyl record. Crosby's sponsor Philco would join Columbia in selling a new $29.95 record player with jeweled stylus (not steel) tracking at only 10 grams (not 200) for these LPs. No longer would records wear out after 75 plays. Crosby's Ampex Company would be joined by Magnecord, Webcor, Revere, and Fairchild in selling one million tape recorders to a rapidly growing consumer audio component market by 1953. The 1949 Magnecord tape recorder had stereo capability eight years before any vinyl record had it. These components soon began to feature the transistor invented by Bell Labs in 1948. Crosby's 1942 film Holiday Inn (where he first sang his most famous song) would be remade in 1954 as White Christmas, the first film to use Paramount's new VistaVision wide-screen film process with multi-channel magnetic sound.

[edit] Thoroughbred horse racing

Bing Crosby was a fan of Thoroughbred horse racing and bought his first racehorse in 1935. In 1937 he became a founding partner and member of the Board of Directors of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, a race track at Del Mar, California. [4]. One of Crosby's closet friends was Lindsay Howard, for whom he named his son Lindsay and from whom he would purchase his 40-room Hillsborough estate in 1965. Lindsay Howard was the son of millionaire businessman Charles S. Howard who owned a successful racing stable that included Seabiscuit. Charles S. Howard would join Crosby as a founding partner and director of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club.

Crosby and Lindsay Howard formed Binglin Stable to race and breed thoroughbred horses at a ranch in Moorpark in Ventura County, California. They also established the Binglin stock farm in Argentina where they raced horses at Hipódromo de Palermo in Palermo, Buenos Aires. Binglin stable purchased a number of Argentine-bred horses and shipped them back to race in the United States. On August 12, 1938, the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club hosted a $25,000 winner-take-all match race won by Charles S. Howard's Seabiscuit over Binglin Stable's Ligaroti. Binglin's horse Don Bingo won the 1943 Suburban Handicap at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York.

The Binglin Stable partnership came to an end in 1953 as a result of a liquidation of assets by Crosby in order to raise the funds necessary to pay the federal and state inheritance taxes on his deceased wife's estate. [5]

The Bing Crosby Breeders' Cup Handicap at Del Mar Thoroughbred Club is named in his honor.

[edit] Personal life

Bing Crosby with his first wife Dixie Lee.
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Bing Crosby with his first wife Dixie Lee.

Crosby was married twice, first to actress/nightclub singer Dixie Lee from 1930 until her death from ovarian cancer in 1952. They had four sons (Gary, Dennis, Phillip and Lindsay). Dixie was an alcoholic, and the 1947 film Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman is indirectly based on her life. After Dixie's death, Bing married the much-younger actress Kathryn Grant in 1957 (It would have been Pat Sheehan had she not turned him down) and they had three children together, Harry, Mary (best known for portraying Kristin Shepard, the woman who shot J.R. Ewing on TV's Dallas) and Nathaniel.

Bing Crosby had an interest in sports. From 1946 until the mid-1960s, Crosby was part-owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 1978, he and Bob Hope were voted the Bob Jones Award, the highest honor given by the United States Golf Association in recognition of distinguished sportsmanship in golf.

Shortly after 6:00 p.m. on October 14, 1977, Bing Crosby died instantly when he suffered a massive heart attack after a round of eighteen holes of golf in Madrid, Spain. He was 74 years old. His last words were reported as, "That was a great game of golf, fellas." However, according to his companions and recorded by biographer Gary Giddens, Crosby then said, "Let's go get a Coke." Because of incorrect instructions from his family, the year of birth engraved on Bing Crosby's tombstone is 1904, rather than the correct date of 1903. He was interred in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California

After Bing's death, his image as an ideal father (fostered in part by his family's participation on his famous holiday television specials) was nearly destroyed when his eldest son, Gary, wrote a highly critical memoir (Going My Own Way) depicting Bing as cold, remote, and both physically and psychologically abusive. His son Phillip frequently disputed his brother Gary's claims about their father. In an interview conducted in 1999 by the Globe, Phillip is quoted as saying, "My dad was not the monster my lying brother said he was, he was strict, but my father never beat us black and blue and my brother Gary was a vicious, no-good liar for saying so. I have nothing but fond memories of dad, going to studios with him, family vacations at our cabin in Idaho, boating and fishing with him. To my dying day, I'll hate Gary for dragging dad's name through the mud. He wrote Going My Own Way out of greed. He wanted to make money and knew that humiliating our father and blackening his name was the only way he could do it. He knew it would generate a lot of publicity. That was the only way he could get his ugly, no-talent face on television and in the newspapers. My dad was my hero. I loved him very much. He loved all of us too, including Gary. He was a great father." Phillip died in 2004; the media reported the causes as "natural" or "unspecified" because the coroner declined to release specific details.

Crosby reportedly overindulged in alcohol in his youth, and may have been dismissed from Paul Whiteman's orchestra because of it. He later got a handle on his drinking, but his first wife Dixie Lee was an alcoholic. A 2001 biography of Crosby by Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins says that Louis Armstrong's influence on Bing "extended to his love of marijuana." Bing smoked it during his early career when it was legal and "surprised interviewers" in the 1960s and 70s by advocating its decriminalization, as did Armstrong. According to Giddins, Bing told his son Gary to stay away from alcohol ("It killed your mother") and suggested he smoke pot instead. Gary said, "There were other times when marijuana was mentioned and he'd get a smile on his face." Gary thought his father's pot smoking had influenced his easy-going style in his films.

Two of Bing's children, Lindsay and Dennis, committed suicide. It was widely published at the time of Lindsay's December 11, 1989 death that he ended his life the day after watching his father sing "White Christmas" on television. Dennis ended his life two years later, grieving over his brother's death, and battered, just as his brother had been, by alcoholism, failed relationships, and a lackluster career. Both brothers were subsisting on small allowances from their father's trust fund; both died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head.

Denise Crosby, Dennis' daughter, is also an actress and best known for her role as Tasha Yar on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Nathaniel Crosby, Bing's youngest son from his second marriage, was a high-level golfer who won the U.S. Amateur at age 19 in 1981, becoming the youngest-ever winner of that event (a record later broken by Tiger Woods).

At his death, Bing was worth over $150 million USD because of his shrewd investments in oil, real estate, and other commodities, making him one of Hollywood's then wealthiest residents along with Fred MacMurray and best friend Bob Hope. He left a clause in his will stating that his sons from his first marriage could not collect their inheritance money until they were in their 80s. Bing felt that they had already been amply taken care of by a trust fund set up by their mother, Dixie Lee. All four sons continued to collect monies from that fund until their deaths. However, none lived long enough to collect any of their inheritance from their father.

Just before his sudden death, Bing was playing 18 holes of golf, where he shot a respectable score of 85 — and won the match. Of his death, biographer Giddins has written: "His last words were characteristic. Walking off the eighteenth green of the La Moraleja Golf Club, in a suburb of Madrid, Bing Crosby said, 'That was a great game of golf, fellas,' and then took a few steps and was gone"2. According to the Summer 2001 issue of Club Crosby's BINGANG magazine, his actual last words were, "Let's go have a Coca-Cola." Bing Crosby - The Final Round

[edit] Trivia

  • In 1992, Artie Shaw offered his opinion of Crosby's place in American culture in these terms: "The thing you have to understand about Bing Crosby is that he was the first hip white person born in the United States"1
  • He turned down an offer to play "Columbo" because he didn't want it to interfere with his golf schedule
  • His childhood home in Spokane, Washington now serves as the Alumni Association office for Gonzaga University. His dorm blanket hangs in the stairwell, and other memorabilia can be found on the first floor as well as in the "Crosbyana Room" at the Crosby Student Center. A statue of Crosby is located at the front steps of the student center, although his pipe has frequently been stolen as a prank. There is a campus legend that Crosby was asked to leave Gonzaga after trying (and failing) to use a pulley to bring a piano to his fourth floor dorm room in DeSmet Hall; the piano reportedly shattered on the ground below.
  • He was a major supporter of the U.S. Republican Party and actively campaigned for Wendell Willkie in the 1940 presidential election, after which he decided not to campaign again.[5]

[edit] Music Samples

[edit] Filmography

Preceded by
Paul Lukas
for Watch on the Rhine		 Academy Award for Best Actor
1944
for Going My Way		 Succeeded by
Ray Milland
for The Lost Weekend

[edit] Television work

  • The Bing Crosby Show (1954)
  • The Edsel Show (1957)
  • Bing Crosby in London (1961)
  • The Bing Crosby Show (1964-1965)
  • Bing Crosby in Dublin (1965)
  • Goldilocks (1971) (voice)
  • Dr. Cook's Garden (1971)
  • Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire: A Couple of Song and Dance Men (1975)
  • The Bell Telephone Jubilee (1976)

[edit] Discography

These Are Crosby's Gramophone records or LPs.

Bing Crosby's album White Christmas has not been out of print since 1954 and has entered the Billboard Top 40 charts 5 times including multiple times in the top five.
Enlarge
Bing Crosby's album White Christmas has not been out of print since 1954 and has entered the Billboard Top 40 charts 5 times including multiple times in the top five.

[edit] Autobiography and Biographies

  • Call Me Lucky: Bing Crosby's Own Story (as told to Pete Martin) (1953) Autobiography.
  • Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man by Donald Shepherd, Robert F. Slatzer (1981) Highly critical.
  • My Life With Bing by Kathryn Crosby (1983) By his wife.
  • Bing Crosby: Day by Day by Malcolm Macfarlane (2001) Exhaustively detailed.
  • Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams-the Early Years, 1903-1940 by Gary Giddins (2001) Generally held to be the best biography (of his early years – a second volume may come eventually).

[edit] References

  1. ^ Guinness Sales record
  2. ^ Crosby Movies
  3. ^ Top 10 lists
  4. ^ Crosby Movies
  5. ^ Schoenherr, Steven E. (2005-07-06). Der Bingle Technology. Recording Technology History. Retrieved on 2006-07-11.

[edit] External references

  • iTunes Essentials - Bing Crosby
  • Ken Barnes (2005)Crosby/Jolson Alliance. Bing Crosby meets Al Jolson [CD Liner Notes]London, Sepia
  • Giddins, Gary. A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years, 1903-1940. Boston, New York, & London: Little, Brown and Company, 2001. ISBN 0-316-88645-9
  1. A Pocketful of Dreams, p. 259
  2. A Pocketful of Dreams, p. 3

[edit] External links

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