How is it that yesterday’s truths are so important and there must be some reckoning for those transgressions, but today’s biggest liar is uncontrollable and unaccountable?
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Bing Crosby is not the only Hollywood star whose personal behavior was concealed as a brilliant performer's skills were displayed and accepted by willing audiences. There's some heartbreaking sadness when these remarkable men and women are exposed warts and all.
Our Secret Lives betray us, and perhaps we must adopt a way to separate the artist and his/her art from the artist apart from the art. Some will object, of course. Just as Bing and Dixie viciously demanded behavior of their sons that they tolerated and exhibited in themselves, so it is difficult for us to forgive and forget.
And yet: they gave us joy, they entranced us with their remarkable performance skills. Step back into the national mindset as Bing introduced "White Christmas" during the summer, fall and winter of '42. It was a performance that truly helped pull us through the War. Followed by Bing with warm accompaniment by guitarist Les Paul rendering "It's Been a Long, Long Time" at war's end. Those of us still able to remember can still react with emotion to what is meaningful about "entertainment."
How many films, plays, songs, books, works of art must we abandon because the artists involved were less than their perfect creations?
It was an imperfect Jack Kennedy who made popular the line "Life is unfair." We should be so uncaring as to rub it in?
Doug Giebel, Big Sandy, Montana
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@Doug Giebel
PS: Of course some people, not only singers and actors,
might be wise to not have children.
dg
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PPS:
Or private lives.
dg
I never saw the appeal of Bing Crosby, just as I never saw the appeal of Elvis. Yeah, I’ve heard the argument that each of them “changed the world,” and made possible all the good things that followed. I try and try, but just don’t get it.
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@K D P go figure.
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It was in no small part the microphone technology that allowed the intimacy of the non-operatic voice to be recorded and Bing had a classic, nearly parlor, voice to take advantage of that technology.
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Just my feeling that there would be no American crooners had it not been for Al Bowlly a UK -South African singer who in many older pop music histories was known as the first crooner in the back in the early 1930's ,who died in London during a Nazi blitz attack ,a few of his videos are on youtube.
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An excellent review by James Gavin, himself a superb biographer. I'm interested enough in this second installment to buy it, despite the flaws pointed out in this critique.
@Inwood 207
This review I sadly put in the section:"With friend's like these I don't need enemies".
Mr. Crosby had a very private life and it seems Mr. Giddins
could not find much that changed that view which might have otherwise appeared sensational ,truly no fault there of the biographer.
I grew up listening to Bing Crosby, saw all his movies on a black and white TV and believed his movie persona. I had always thought he was a great guy until I read his son Gary's book. It was a real eye opener and sad to realize that Bing's movie and TV stage presence was just that, an act. Still, his voice had a quality and resonance few people have. I still believe he was one of the great singers of all time, it's just sad to understand that he was lacking in so many other areas.
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As a child of the 1940s and early 50s, it was nonetheless pretty obvious what was heard on the radio and seen in the movies and on television was the Hollywood of propaganda, most of it "nice". Indeed, that image of the "entertainment industry" forgave much of real life. Most scandals and affairs were taken for granted on the surface and made fortunes for publishers of slick-paper monthly magazines eagerly awaited by housewives in kitchen aprons. What became commonly known only ramped-up demand for excess that today gave us who's in the White House . . .
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