"My Father & I"

The boys had their father's name going for them, and they had a faint but familiar facsimile of their old man's talent. They also had a fierce urge to prove that they could make it on their own. So Bing Crosby's four sons--Gary, 26, twins Dennis and Phil, 25, and Lindsay, 21--put together a family-style act of songs and smart-aleck chatter and started right at the top of the nightclub circuit. The Crosby boys blew into Las Vegas' Sahara nightclub last month, after three successful weeks at Chicago's Chez Paree, on the greatest burst of friendly publicity they have known since they started collecting drunken-driving citations and showgirls some five years ago.

It was too good to last. Soon the cracks about "Kathy Grant's husband" began to sound less like jokes than angry jeers. By week's end most of the Sahara crowd were coming around, not to laugh but to learn more about the Crosby clan's squabbles. Gary, the boss of the troupe, made sure no one was disappointed. "My father and I," he told a reporter, "just don't get along any more. Dad did some things last Christmas that I felt were far from right."

What Bing had done, Gary did not specify. His remarks only served as reminders that Bing, too, had talked freely and foolishly about himself and his boys a few months before. He had failed as a father, Bing confessed to a Hollywood columnist. Somehow the strict discipline, the skimpy allowances, and long hours of hard ranch work to which he subjected his boys had not had the desired effect. They were forever getting into scrapes; even the Army had not made disciplined men of them. "They won't listen to me," Bing complained, "and it burns me up." Even his sons' attitude toward money, said the multimillionaire Groaner, seemed silly in the extreme. "It doesn't mean a thing to Gary--and Philip, Dennis and Linny are very tight, so tight it horrifies me."

Coming from Bing, the cry had a hollow ring. The boys still remember his long estrangement from their mother, the late Dixie Lee,, and they have yet to forgive him. They could take no pride in the mounting box score of their own shenanigans (public brawls, one man dead after numerous drunken-driving accidents, Dennis' paternity suit), but do not think that Bing has set a much better example. Not one of his sons expressed much sorrow that their father had chosen to go fishing out in the Pacific rather than turn up for the opening of their night club act in Las Vegas.

After all, explained Gary, it is not Bing before whom they want to strut their stuff. "There has been so much bad written about us that we all wanted to show people that we are not just four lazy fops hanging around Hollywood with too much money. We had to prove that at least some of us have talent."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.