Cinema: The Groaner

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The Life. With affluence and a family, Bing's life has slipped into more conservative channels. Nowadays if he isn't working he likes to get out to the track for the early-morning workouts, squeeze in 18 or 36 holes of golf in the morning, hurry back to the track for the afternoon racing.

Except for an occasional nightclub outing with Dixie, he spends his evenings at home with the family telling the boys bedtime stories in Crosbyesque slang. One night Little Red Riding Hood finally gets "hep" that the wolf isn't grandma; the next night Goldilocks makes a "three-bowl parlay" on the bears' porridge. Every few months he asks over his old musician friends—Manny Klein, Lennie Hayton, Joe Venuti, and whoever happens to be in town—for a jam session in his large rumpus room. Summers he packs the family off to the ranch near Del Mar.

Although Bing's activities are quieter, his manner isn't. Old friends from Spokane still recognize the happy-go-lucky Crosby approach which is transmitted to radio audiences in the jargon which keeps the Kraft Music Hall one of the peppiest shows on the air. There is no room for the usual tense radio nerves around K. M. H.

with The Groaner trucking around the studio stage in an old pair of slacks and the tails of his gaudy shirts hanging out, kidding the men in the control booth or joking with wheel-chaired Connie Boswell.

The show always has an impromptu atmosphere on the air and has a bad habit of running long, as Bing never holds a full rehearsal. If anything goes wrong, Bing's trigger-quick tongue is a certain safeguard. Recently, when Guest Jackie Cooper dropped his drummer's sticks during an act, Bing filled in with: "Hold the phone, there's been a nasty accident." For his solos, Bing has had one or two rehearsals with the band to get the timing, merely pulls out his pipe and tucks his gum against his teeth when the time comes to go on. Jack Kapp, for whom Bing makes Decca records, recalls that The Groaner's singing is so facile he recorded the complicated Ballad for Americans in four hours. The same song took Paul Robeson three weeks.

The Voice. The gloomy souls who prophesied such a shoddy ending to Bing's career overlooked the most important Crosby quality. Like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Bill Tilden, who thrilled the fans of the '203, Bing knows how to please the crowd, all ages, all sexes. Journalist Joseph Chamberlain Furnas (—And Sudden Death) stated the case with scientific coolness when he wrote: "The prevalent feminine verdict is still that [Crosby]is definitely cute, while the masculine part of the audience seems not to mind him at all—which distributes the positive and negative reactions in exactly the right places." That Bing Crosby's voice is America's favorite depends upon the fact that it not only sounds good, but that Crosby sings every song—whether it is Mexicali Rose or Silent Night, Holy Night—as though he felt it was the best song ever written.

And characteristically, the happy-go-lucky Groaner manages to convey the impression that anyone could do the trick.

Says he: "A crooner gets his quota of sentimentality with half his natural voice. That's a great saving. I don't like to work."