THE "TRUTH" ABOUT BING

I had this writing as a comment to one of my other postings, but I think it is so well written, it deserves to be made into an article. The comment was written by Steven Little...

Seems that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle between the book and "we was a great dad." I am guessing that part of the motivation to "he was a great dad" was to protect his reputation and probably the value of his music, movie, image, etc rights of which I'm sure they all got a piece. Gary's book may or may not have been the truth and his recanting may have had to do with embracing the real truth or trying to make amends to the family and his father's memory.

I think for the most part people separate their 'love' of the artist and his art from the person. There are ugly rumors (or truths) regarding many artists out there. Back in the day much of these were swept under the rug as people were paid off by studios etc to not report drinking problems, drugs use, affairs, homosexuality, etc, Many of these things are now commonly ignored or blow over with the public or are complete non-issues and media coverage is so much more intense that almost everything eventually comes out.

Bing's issues (whatever they were) were more shocking because he had such a lily white image and they came from a close family member and he was an icon with a different generation. As I said we don't know the truth but, I'm guessing from the family history of alcoholism, divorce, depression, and suicide in his sons that there is something to these stories to what extent? Who knows? The bottom line is his work is what it is and those of us who enjoy it should do so regardless. The truth is artists, singers, actors, and geniuses are all humans and they all have their flaws or perceived flaws. It is best to enjoy the persona and their work and not dig too deep unless you are prepared to handle what you find.

If you are a fan of the cinema and are a homophobe it is best to avoid looking into your favorite stars' lives as many of them will leave you disappointed. Personally I don't care about that or many other issues when I watch, look at, read, or listen to their performances. I do have a few flaws that I can't ignore but, don't we all. Imagine how much poorer we'd be if we threw away all the art, music, writings, and movies produced by someone that doesn't meet some lofty standard.

I think that for the most part Bing is remembered fondly and rarely do I see these references and when I do they are a passing joke with little or no impact...

GRACE KELLY AS BING'S WIFE

Grace Kelly won an Academy Award for her role as Georgie Elgin, wife of an alcoholic, played by Bing Crosby, in 1954’s “The Country Girl.”

She was cast against type as long-suffering wife wearing spectacles and dowdy cardigans, and some doubted whether she could pull off the role. Yet her performance earned her an Oscar against Judy Garland in “A Star Is Born” and Dorothy Dandridge in “Carmen Jones.”

What did people have to say about Kelly’s iconic role?

1. “ ‘The Country Girl’ comes along fitly as one of the fine and forceful pictures of the year,” a New York Times review said in December 1954.

2. Not everyone was so complimentary. Bushy-browed wise-cracker Groucho Marx called Kelly’s Oscar win over Garland “the worst highway robbery since Brink’s,” according to the New York Daily News.

3. Kelly herself told her biographer, “High Society” author Donald Spoto, that Bing Crosby was not thrilled about her being cast in the role: “He almost withdrew from the picture when he heard that I was going to play the part,” the Independent quoted her. The actress said Crosby told producers she was “too pretty” for the role of a frumpy wife.

4. But Kelly said Crosby changed his mind when he saw her drab wardrobe: “She was to play a woman who had been married for 10 years and has lost interest in clothes, herself – everything,” Paramount’s costumier Edith Head said of the character in The Independent.

5. The movie may have given Kelly a little more grit. “Prior to her nomination, she was known as a Hitchcock blonde,” author Bronwyn Cosgrave wrote in the book Made for Each Other: Fashion and the Academy Awards (Bloomsbury, 2007).

6. For all of the heat the Oscar contest drew that year, some of the best quotes came from the movie itself:

Bernie Dodd (played by William Holden): “Does your wife really want you to play this part?

Frank Elgin (played by Crosby, Kelly’s on-screen husband): “Yeah, she’s all for it.”

Bernie Dodd: “I was just wondering. The day I met her, she seemed a little difficult about terms and rather domineering, I thought.”

Frank Elgin: “She wasn’t always like that.”

Bernie Dodd: “Oh, I know, I know. They all start out as Juliets and wind up as Lady Macbeths.”

7. “The de-glamorized Grace Kelly, dressed matronly in frumpy garb, won Best Actress for playing the long-suffering wife, in a performance that I believe she was not suited for and left me scratching my head to wonder what the Academy saw that I didn't (she never got inside the intense angst of her character),” wrote reviewer Dennis Schwartz.

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THE ROAD TO IDAHO

By SYD ALBRIGHT

After Bing Crosby died in 1977 following 18 holes of golf near Madrid, Spain, Bob Hope said, "If friends could have been made to order, I would have asked for one like Bing." Nearly 3,000 mourners agreed and packed St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City for his memorial service.

His fatherly figure persona with the happy smile, mellow voice and unique singing style made him one of the most popular icons in entertainment history. We're reminded of him every winter when he sings, "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know..."

And who can forget Bing clowning and dancing with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour - the Sarong Queen - in the 1940 Road to Singapore comedy movie, and the six other "Road to" films ending in 1962 with The Road to Hong Kong?

Harry Lillis Crosby Jr. was born in Tacoma, one of seven children,and was raised in Spokane after age 3. Graduating from Gonzaga High School and spending three years at Gonzaga University, Bing also had a heart for Idaho, recording a University of Idaho fight song - "You're the Gem State, Idaho."

Bing's father - a bookkeeper - was of English descent whose ancestors included William Brewster, who came to America on the Mayflower in 1620 and was religious leader of Plymouth Colony. His mother Catherine Helen (Kate) was a second-generation Irish-American.

At age 7, Harry Junior enjoyed a comic strip in the Spokesman-Review called The Bingville Bugle. A neighbor kid named Valentine Hobart started calling him "Bingo from Bingville," and that's how Crosby got his nickname.

While working a summer job as a teenager at Spokane's Auditorium, he was inspired by watching Al Jolson perform; kindling his interest in entertaining. His first stint in show biz was playing drums in a band performing at high school dances and clubs. Next was singing at the Clemmer Theater - now Spokane's Bing Crosby Theater.

In 1925, Bing and his piano player pal Al Rinker took off for Los Angeles, where Al's sister, singer Mildred Bailey, helped them climb the show biz ladder. After a number of low-level gigs earning them $75 a week each, they caught the eye of bandleader Paul Whiteman who hired them and doubled their salary.

Whiteman put together The Rhythm Boys trio of Bing, Al and pianist-singer-songwriter Harry Barris, which led to movies - singing Mississippi Mud and several other songs in King of Jazz, made by Universal in 1930. Then trouble began.

"After awhile, Whiteman and Crosby started to not get along," one source wrote. "Bing had a drinking problem, and that had landed him in jail a couple of times. He missed some of the filming of Whiteman's movie 'King Of Jazz,' after being involved in a drinking and driving incident. Whiteman got Crosby released from the jail. Crosby was escorted in handcuffs to the studio by police whenever he was scheduled to appear in the movie."

The following year, the Rhythm Boys had a contract hassle with management while performing in L.A. at the Coconut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel (where Robert Kennedy was shot and killed). They quit the gig and soon broke up. But Bing's career as a solo singer took off.

By 1936, he was host of NBC's Kraft Music Hall on radio, replacing his former boss Paul Whiteman. He held that job for the next 10 years and showcased his signature song, "When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day..."

Bing appeared in more than three-dozen movies in the Thirties, and then hit the big time in the Forties with Road to Singapore, followed by a stream of films including Holiday Inn (1942), singing "White Christmas."

The advent of sophisticated microphones helped Bing sing. He didn't have to bellow his voice so that the audiences in the back of the theater could hear him - like his idol Al Jolson did.

Bing's lifelong friend, Spokane dentist Herb Rotchford, had a home on Hayden Lake and Bing would often visit. He loved the golf and the fishing. "He liked it so much, he had my father buy him a house on the lake and a Chris-Craft boat, sight unseen," Herb Jr. said.

In his autobiography Call Me Lucky, Bing called Hayden Lake an "oasis of enjoyment in a hurly-burly world." In 1930, Bing married Dixie Lee an 18-year-old actress whose real name was Wilma Winifred Wyatt, mother of Bing's four sons: Gary, twins Philip and Dennis and Lindsay.

There are probably dark pockets in everyone's life - including celebrities like Bing - but LIFE Magazine called him "incontestably the No. 1 Big Family Man of Hollywood," and others said he was "Hollywood's Most Typical Father." But was he?

His eldest son Gary didn't think so, remembering in his book Going My Own Way, "I dropped my pants, pulled down my under-shorts and bent over. Then he went at it with the belt dotted with metal studs he kept reserved for the occasion. Quite dispassionately, without the least display of emotion or loss of self-control, he whacked away until he drew the first drop of blood, and then he stopped. It normally took between 12 and 15 strokes."

However, People Magazine reported that Bing's boys were hardly paragons of virtue - possibly needing a little discipline: "That his four sons became notorious for drinking and squabbling scarcely tainted Bing's image; instead, he became the object of public sympathy, the good father afflicted with unruly and sometimes ungrateful children."

Gary noted how different his father was compared to the role he played as the kindly and wise Father O'Malley in the movie Going My Way that earned him an Academy Award.

Dixie also supported her husband's rigid discipline over the boys. Behind the curtain at the Crosby household it was far from the loving image that Bing projected. "It was a house of terror all the time," according to Gary, who described it as a household headed by an icy, dictatorial father, a lonely alcoholic mother and four boisterous, tormented boys.

Philip denied the charges, calling Gary a liar, but Dennis and Lindsay confirmed the abuse. Nevertheless, Lindsay charitably said, "I don't know of many fathers who gave more consideration to their children."

Family squabbles aside, Bing Crosby had a triumphant career.

During World War II, he exemplified The Greatest Generation by entertaining the troops fighting in Europe.

It must have been heart-wrenching for Bing playing the part of an alcoholic has-been in The Country Girl (1954), costarring Grace Kelly, when the bottle constantly had tormented the Crosby family. Bing controlled his drinking, but Dixie couldn't. In 1952, alcohol and ovarian cancer sadly took her life at age 40.

Then Bing pursued actresses Inger Stevens and Grace Kelly before marrying actress Kathryn Grant in 1957. They had three children - sons Harry Lillis III and Nathaniel, and daughter Mary, who is remembered as playing the character who shot JR in the popular Dallas television series.

Bing's latter years were devoted mostly to golf - a lifelong passion - television appearances, and building a business empire of TV stations, thoroughbred horse racing, Minute Maid frozen orange juice, Ampex Corporation and other enterprises.

In his lifetime, he made 79 movies and sang an incredible 396 chart singles, with 43 No. 1 hits - White Christmas three times.

On Oct. 14, 1977, Bing and his golfing pals walked away from the 18th hole at a Madrid golf course and he said, "That was a great game of golf, fellas." Moments later he suffered a massive heart attack.

Along with all the glory, awards, triumphs and tears, Bing Crosby will always be remembered as the affable, easy-going crooner with the blue eyes and the mellow voice.

Bob Hope outlived his old pal Bing by 28 years. When Bob died in 2003 at age 100, the world had lost two of the towering entertainment icons of the 20th century. Bing's White Christmas and Jingle Bells will still be heard every Christmas, and Bob Hope will always be in the hearts of military veterans for all his road shows in six wars - bringing smiles to grateful GI Joes taking a break from death and destruction.

It's not hard to imagine Bing and Bob making just one more movie together - Road to Heaven.

Syd Albright is a writer and journalist living in Post Falls. Contact him at silverflix@roadrunner.com.

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GOING MY WAY: A 1944 REVIEW

Here is an original review of the 1944 Bing Crosby classic Going My Way. This was written by Kate Cameron and published in The Daily News on May 3, 1944...


Paramount may have made a more appealing, more tenderly human and amusing picture than “Going My Way,” during its many years of film-making, but if so, I have missed it.

The production that had its first showing at Paramount Theatre last evening is a heart-warming delightful entertainment. It has to do with the beguiling way of a young priest with an aging pastor, when the former is assigned by his bishop to supersede the old man in discharging the affairs of St. Dominicks church and in keeping the parish from becoming atrophied, as it was in danger of becoming under the feeble guidance of Father Fitzgibbon.

It is a simple tale, simply told by director, authors and cast. Leo McCarey, who produced the picture for Paramount, directed it and wrote the original story, kept a firm but gentle hand on his cast. Not once during the more than two hours of running time did a single player step out of character, nor were the lines or action permitted to cross the invisible boundary line of good taste.

You can’t tell a story about a priest very well without touching on his religion, so the church takes its place in the controversy between young Father O’Malley and spiritual aspects of the picture are blended so naturally with the temporal affairs on the screen that the audience is hardly aware that it is listening to a most persuasive sermon on charity, which is the theme of the narrative.

Bing Crosby departs from his usual screen impersonation in the role of Father Chuck O’Malley. He sings, of course, as a Bing Crosby picture would be a waste without a song or two from the crooner. But surprises the audience by turning in a fine characterization.

His is an impressive performance that might well earn him an Academy Award next year, if it weren’t for the fact that he is competing with Barry Fitzgerald, whose performance of Father Fitzgibbon is a really brilliant delineation of a slightly senile old man.

Rise Stevens, in the role of a Metropolitan Opera star who had been a schoolmate of Father O’Malley and his friend, Father O’Dowd, is lovely to look at and a delight to the ear when she sings an aria from “Carmen” and two new numbers entitled “Day After Tomorrow” and “Going My Way.”

Bing also sings the latter songs and in addition croons “Would You Like to Swing on a Star,” to the accompaniment of a chorus of fine young male voices.

Jean Heather and James Brown, two promising young players, give the picture its touch of romance. Frank McHugh is fine as Father O’Dowd and Gene Lockhart, Eily Malyon and Stanley Clemens help to make “Going My Way” one of the film delights of this or any other year...

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