New biography chronicles Bing Crosby’s most beloved years: Video

Bing Crosby was one of the most popular figures of the 20th century. His record sales were in the hundreds of millions, his movies were blockbusters, his weekly radio show topped the ratings.

The way Crosby sang paved the way for Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dean Martin and many others. A new biography called Swinging on a Star: The War Years 1940 -1946, out now, focuses on Crosby’s life and career in the 1940s when the crooner’s star shone the brightest. Written by jazz and film critic Gary Giddins, the book is the second in a multi-volume project chronicling Harry Lillis “Bing” Crosby Jr.
Crosby was a singer first and foremost; his appeal started with his voice. “He had wonderful high notes. He had amazing low notes. He was like a cello when he was really in good voice,” Giddins says.

Early in the decade, Crosby created the template for the multimedia entertainment superstar. He was seemingly everywhere, but despite the singer’s enormous fame, he was humble and self-effacing, which made audiences embrace Crosby as one of their own.

“He really did come across as somebody — even though he’s smarter than you are, and more talented than you are — as somebody that you really might know. As somebody who might live down the block,” Giddins says. “That was one of the things he did on radio. He really gave the vernacular American voice back to Americans at a time when the networks wanted these mid-Atlantic ‘How Now Brown Cow’ kind of speakers.”

In 1972, Crosby told a British television interviewer that when he began acting in movies, producers tried to improve his looks. They said that Crosby’s ears stuck out too far, and got the makeup artist to pin them back with glue. Nevertheless, Crosby became a matinee idol. He won an Oscar for best actor in the 1944 filmGoing My Way. In the film, Crosby plays a parish priest in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood who works miracles with the human heart, transforming a gang of street toughs into a boys’ choir.

In his 1942 film Holiday Inn, Crosby sings an Irving Berlin song that would solidify his fame for years to come. “White Christmas,” which remains the best-selling single of all time, struck a nerve with millions of Americans whose husbands, sons and lovers were fighting on a distant continent and dreaming of spending the holidays at home. Three years later, Crosby made a song, “It’s Been A Long, Long Time,” about the end of World War II, without explicitly mentioning war.