Cinema: The Groaner

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Casual, talented and loaded with Irish luck, the Crosby career is also notable for making a bum out of Horatio Alger. For in 37 years, Bing Crosby has shed a confusing new light on the problem of how to be a success. He has never studied music or voice or pounded the pavements looking for work; yet jobs kept turning up—each a little better than the last. He always falls uphill. Year after year he just sings, and people pay fortunes to hear him. Over the radio, Bing's voice is worth $7,500 for one hour's broadcast a week.

On records, it sold 3,500,000 discs this year and earned him $77,000. In the movies, it brings him $175,000 a picture for three pictures a year.

The Beginning. As one of seven children of a Spokane, Wash, accountant, Bing's earliest leanings were towards having fun. Pleasant and easygoing, he liked to swim at Mission Park on hot days or whack around the Downriver golf course with his rusty, secondhand clubs. His vague goal was the law, which he leisurely studied at nearby Gonzaga University.

Now & then he picked up some spending money by rattling the drums and singing in the six-piece high-school band of his friend Al Rinker.

Once on a vacation trip to Los Angeles, Bing and Al ran out of money, had to find jobs or head home. They polished up a couple of tunes, landed a job in a local theatre. Al played the piano and Bing stood by, tapping a cymbal while they harmonized on some speedy ditties like Paddlin' Madeline Home and Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue. It earned them $65 a week apiece, which bought all the fun they wanted. Just when everything was going smoothly, Paul Whiteman heard them, offered them $150 a week to join his show.

That was Bing's start. From then on he violated the strictest tenets of success.

Whiteman let him go because he was lazy, and he immediately landed a better job at Los Angeles' Cocoanut Grove. The Grove fired him for disappearing on long weekends to Palm Springs and Agua Caliente, and Mack Sennett hired him to act in some movie shorts. Prohibition booze gave him laryngitis which muffled his voice to a whisper, and he received a $3,000-a-week radio contract. Eddie Lang, his best friend and accompanist, died, and Bing wound up making pictures for Paramount. He seemed listless, but his income always increased.

Bing's future was summarized by coony Hollywood Producer Sol Wurtzel at the time Bing was singing at the Grove. Wurtzel noticed that Dixie Lee, one of his actresses on the Fox lot, seemed to be spending a lot of time with Bing, so he warned her: "Dixie, you'd better give that fellow up, because if you marry him, you'll have to support him for the rest of your life." She did and she has not.

Success. Ever since his fight with the Grove in 1931, Bing has let other people run his affairs. They are crack Los Angeles Attorney Jack O'Melveny and his two brothers, Everett and Larry. At that time his brother, Everett, and O'Melveny incorporated him into Bing Crosby, Ltd.

to keep his hands off his property. Bing is now the major stockholder in the profitable little Del Mar race track, owns a 100-acre breeding ranch near the track, some 75 horses, and enough ready cash to pay a $377,000 income tax for 1940.