[Dixielandjazz] Bing Crosby -- Tribune News Service, November 24, 2014

[Robert Ringwald]

My grandmother loved Bing Crosby. She was very religious and thought that Crosby was a saint and that bad language would never pass his lips. 

So one of my uncles purchased a record that had reported to have been smuggled out of a recording studio. The song was “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams.” Bing is singing and then all of a sudden he sings, 

“They left out 8 bars the dirty bastards.”

My grandmother was devastated to find out that Bing would actually say “bastards.”

-Bob Ringwald




‘Bing Crosby Remembered’ Aims to Introduce Legend to Younger Generations
by Luaine Lee
Tribune News Service, November 24, 2014
BEVERLY HILLS -- For more than 30 years Bing Crosby was the epitome of a multi-tasker.
He was a giant in the music world, a radio icon, a movie star, a world famous golf
enthusiast and a television tradition.
Those over 40 probably know him for his evergreen Christmas movie, “White Christmas”
but little else. PBS’ “American Masters” hopes to change that with “Bing Crosby Remembered,”
a documentary by Robert Trachtenberg premiering Dec. 2 and encoring on Dec. 26 (check
local listings).
Old timers remember that Crosby also fathered two families: four boys with his first
wife and two boys and a girl with his second. It was a shock when his oldest son,
Gary, wrote a book about his youth and depicted his father as a cruel disciplinarian.
But Crosby never held anything back from the public, insists Trachtenberg. “In the
mid-’50s, Bing says, ‘I disciplined these boys.’... You have to put it into context
of the time. Corporal punishment, spanking your kids was the norm. Bing says it in
his autobiography. Bing says it in interviews throughout the ’50s. ‘I disciplined
the kids. Maybe I was too hard on them.’ He‘s completely transparent about it, so
it‘s interesting what the public chooses to remember and to forget and then remember
again, because he never kept anything back.”
His latter-day children, Harry, Nathaniel and Mary, all say he was a kind and loving
parent. “He was an unbelievable father for different reasons, but he really concentrated
on us one-on-one,” says Nathaniel, who is a golfer.
“With Harry, it was hunting and taking him to the duck club on the weekends. With
me we shared our love of sports together. We would have season tickets, to the 49er
games at Candlestick, and he would wear the overcoat and the hat, and nobody -- except
the people in the immediate section -- even knew who he was. He was very unassuming,
and was concentrating on me during those games, unless he had to go down and sing
the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ which he did once,” recalls Nathaniel.
Mary Crosby, best known as the actress who plugged J.R. on “Dallas,” says he was
a wise and gentle father. “He actually gave me specific advice as a child... I was
pretty young. I was maybe 8. And we were always included in adult functions. We were
never, like, seen and not heard... And Dad said to me, he said, ‘You know, you’re
really smart, but if you talked less and listened more, you might be smarter.’ And
it was advice that I hold to this day.”
His son, Harry, a guitarist and businessman, says his father would sneak him out
of school on Fridays at noon so they could go duck hunting for the weekend. “It was
a special time, the age of 12, 13, to spend a good couple days with him, just father
and son,” he says.
“We spent some time as a family, unique, couldn’t do it today, where we would go
to Mexico where we kind of home-studied. Mom was a substitute teacher at our school,
so we kind of got the free pass to go... We had to do the curriculum, but we spent
two solid months together in Mexico where we all learned Spanish and got the chance
to spend that time with Dad.”
The mother of the three, the former Kathryn Grant, was a contract player at Paramount
when they met. “I was 18 years old. I was walking down to the drama department with
a bunch of horsehair petticoats and my tennis racket, which had the brace on it,
and I was just walking down the road, and I heard this voice behind me say, ‘Hi,
Tex. What’s your hurry?’... He invited me for a cup of tea, and we went across the
street to Lucy’s and had a cup of hot tea, which I thought was the most romantic
thing that had ever happened to anybody.”
She says dinner followed and the routine continued “till I’d enjoyed about as much
of that as I could stand.
“And then he said, ‘How about dinner?’ And I said, ‘Thank you, no. I’ve been to dinner.’
And then he wanted to visit with me again. I said, ‘Thank you, no.’ And then he talked
to Aunt Mary, and then we flew to Las Vegas and we got married the next day. And
the first time I spoke to him for the whole last year... before we married was ‘I
do.’”
Crosby and comedian Bob Hope were not only a riotous hit in their “Road” pictures,
they were close friends. “When they would do the ‘Road’ movies, during lunch they
would go to Lakeside and play golf,” says Mary Crosby. “And the A.D. (assistant director)
had to come retrieve them off the golf course to get them to go back to work. And
so they were very, very dear friends. And the day Dad died was, as Mom says...”
“It was the only day Bob left a show,” recalls Kathryn Crosby. “He was supposed to
do a charity show in New York, and the word came through that Bing had died. And
he just said, ‘Get me out of here,’ because it was the first time he had ever missed
a show.”
-30

-Bob Ringwald
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