Bathroom Baritone Inc.

CALL ME LUCKY (344 pp.)--Bing Crosby (as told to Pete Martin)--Simon & Schuster (cloth bound, $3.50; paper bound, $1).

One fine day some 40 years ago, pupils of the Webster School in Spokane, Wash, put on a musical show. The significance of the event was not appreciated at the time, and the part of the show in which a number of children dressed like blocks came out onstage to jump up & down got only moderate applause. Nobody particularly cared that one of those blocks was named Harry Lillis Crosby.

In the years since his stage debut at Webster, little Harry Crosby, better known as Bing, has been converted into something like a public utility in the entertainment business. After 25 years of fame, Bing's voice, on records, still fills U.S. airwaves, and his name on a movie marquee is as big a draw, year in year out, as any name in Hollywood.

Now at last the utility has issued a report to the stockholders. Bing, besought by the Satevepost, has dictated his memoirs to Writer Pete Martin, and they have been published under a title, Call Me Lucky, calculated to retouch the custom-made halo of modesty around one of the shrewdest heads in show business. Already published in excerpt by the Post, Call Me Lucky is now off on a climb into bestseller lists.

Tooting the Kazoo. "The Groaner," as ; he sometimes calls himself, was born in 1904, and grew up in Spokane, Wash. with his father, a fun-loving bookkeeper who played the mandolin, his Irish mother, a somewhat sterner type who often took a disciplinary switch to her children, and six other little Crosbys. He had, he says, a youth notable for dozens of odd jobs, a night in jail (for belting a police car with cinnamon buns), a day when he hurled the leg of lamb on the family board at his brother Everett, an intense hatred of mathematics, a propensity for big words and public recitation, and a passion for whistling popular tunes.

After high school, Bing went on to Gonzaga University, but when he found out as a pre-law student that he could make as much as any beginning lawyer in town by singing and tooting a kazoo, he quit school and headed for Los Angeles to break into full-time show business. There, two years later, "Pops" Whiteman auditioned his act, and signed Bing and his partner Al Rinker into the big time.

Whiteman added Harry Barris to Bing and Al, called them The Rhythm Boys and featured them on tour. Says Bing: "We laid them out in sections--we fractured them." Bing adds that he also fractured himself with too much booze, too little work, and too many unlikely companions. He woke up after one binge in a mobster hideout with police machine guns playing chopsticks on the door.

After three years, Pops got tired of all the tomfoolery and gave his promising young singers the gate, but a little later the doorway to fame flew wide open for Bing. CBS offered him a sustaining spot, and all at once the little catch in his voice caught the ear of everybody and his little sister.

The Old Sweet Song. Crosby himself, who says he has "very little voice," has an almost coyly commonplace explanation for his success: "Every man who sees one of my movies, or who listens to my records, or who hears me on the radio, believes firmly that he sings as well as I do, especially when he's in the bathroom shower."

Hollywood was only a telephone call away from radio, and Bing, after a few false starts as a romantic lead, soon shook down into his right role as a straight man for comedians (W. C. Fields, Jack Oakie, Bob Hope). The great exception was Going My Way, in which he played a Roman Catholic priest--and got a 1944 Oscar as the year's best movie actor.

In recent years Bing has made fewer films, and has scarcely made a pass at TV. The old pipes don't give quite the same old sweet song. But Baritone Crosby is doing all right. His contract at Paramount has seven years to run. He grosses better than $175,000 a picture; record royalties bring in a steady $150,000 a year or more. He also has a million or so in real estate, shares in a profitable frozen-juice business, owns a 25,000-acre ranch near Elko, Nev. And if all else should fail, "the income from my oil leases alone would take care of me comfortably for the rest of my life."

All of which helps to explain why the second half of Call Me Lucky is chiefly concerned with the golf Bing has played, the deer he has hunted, the trouble he has matching slacks and sport coats because he is colorblind, and the curious immunity he experiences, when facing an audience, to what the trade calls "flop sweat."

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