Books in Brief: Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man

Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man, by Donald Shepherd and Robert F. Slatzer (St. Martins, 326 pp., $13.95). Discovering that Bing Crosby was an unscrupulous, drunken cad who habitually cheated on his wife is a bit like being told that apple pie causes cancer in laboratory rats. After initially brushing the whole thing off as a pack of lies, you find yourself taking in all the lurid details with horrified fascination; but, once the tale is completed, you end up wanting more than anything else to kill the messenger. In the present case, as it happens, there are two messengers: Donald Shepherd and Robert F. Slatzer, a pair of literary hacks from California who have joined forces to turn out a demolition job on Crosby that is barbarously written but so murderously effective that “White Christmas” may never sound the same again. It seems that (among other things) Crosby deliberately sabotaged the careers of his fellow Rhythm Boys in order to make a start of his own, had to postpone his network radio debut because he was in the middle of a bender, drove his first wife to drink, ran out on her while she was dying of cancer, all but disowned the children of their marriage, and regularly committed adultery with his female co-stars. He even meant all those nasty things he said about Bob Hope! Had these appalling revelations been set in the context of a balanced, intelligent biography, they would certainly have evoked the worst kind of dismay; Shepherd and Slatzer, though, are more than content to stick to their hatchets, causing ennui to set in well before the final chapter. Readers of Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man will get no sense at all of Crosby’s remarkable and lasting stature as a popular artist, though they will find out that he never learned to read music; in the end, one simply wonders why the authors even bothered to write about someone for whom they obviously cared so little.