Der Bungle

"We don't read music," said Phillip Crosby in what must have been the most plausible statement made by a public figure last week. "Like the old man, we fake it." The trouble, of course, is that Ring's boys do not fake it like the old man. Phillip, Dennis and Lindsay (Brother Gary has his own act) sing roughly like three C-plus scholars at a fraternity party. They are clean-cut, modest and likable; after listening to them for a little while, one longs to hear three singers who are dirty-cut, vain and loathsome, but talented.

Although the Crosby boys, who have no illusions about their act, must sometimes want to buy a bowling alley and settle down, they have toured successfully for two years in such neon nirvanas as the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas and Manhattan's Latin Quarter, where they played last week. The secret is conspiracy. The Latin Quarter pretends that it is wild and wicked. The vacationing dentists who jam its tables pretend that they are hugely entertained when the comedian kicks the M.C. Their wives counterfeit sophisticated smiles when bare-breasted show girls jiggle onstage. And when the Crosby brothers admit that, boy, we really hacked up that last song, everyone cheerfully conspires to pretend that they are kidding.

Short and thick-bodied, the boys bounce in front of the mike on the toes of their elevator shoes. They open with a half-sung patter about how hard they have worked on the act and how glad they are to be there. Then they charge down among the first few tables and shake hands. Phillip recalls that when they were children on their father's ranch at Elko, Nev., "there wasn't much to do of a night except sit on the front porch and harmonize." They do, uncertainly, in husky voices that resemble each other too much and Bing's too little. Punching shoulders, mugging at clinkers and bouncing all the while, they work like piano movers to match their father's ease, the height of which is to move the fingers in a finger-snapping motion without actually snapping the fingers. But their nonchalance is too earnest; the effect is chalance.

The brothers close, "as a tribute to the man who made this act possible," with an art-rending groan of When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day. When Bing caught, or was caught by, the act out West (he sees his sons only rarely), he said diplomatically, "You're doin' fine; don't change a thing." With bookings piled up and the take-home pay close to $1,000 a week per man, there is no reason that they should.

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