Nitratevile General Jack-Assery: Rediscovering Bing Crosby

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Richard M Roberts
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Nitratevile General Jack-Assery: Rediscovering Bing Crosby

Postby Richard M Roberts » Thu Oct 17, 2013 4:12 pm

Taking a peek over at Nitratevile today I see their Usually Unenlightened have provided once again some wonderful cluelessness as those arbiters of what dead star was a success of failure proclaimed Bing Crosby unworthy. Bob Fells deemed Der Bingle post-1950 to be “rather sad”.

That’s right, that, poor, broken down old groaner himself, how did he make it being one of the richest stars in Hollywood, still being a popular recording star, and being forced to make those Poverty Row B features like WHITE CHRISTMAS and HIGH SOCIETY? Oh my God, he had to turn to Television, where he made more millions and was a top-rated star, and boy, if those royalties from the Ampex Corp couldn’t help sustain him, maybe the pittance trickling in from the other dozens of Corporations he owned (Minute Maid Orange Juice anybody?) must have helped him make ends meet.

True, his first wife Dixie did indeed pass away, and Bing must have felt terrible while he was boinking Grace Kelly or any of the other young starlets he dated before he married that twenty-something genuine babe Katherine Grant and raised a whole new Family that didn’t inherit their Mother’s Alcohol and Depression tendencies and seemed to have turned out well. What was he thinking? The poor man, it must have been hell for him.

Oh my God, as the sixties progressed, and after being the Pop music icon for something like thirty-five years, Bing was forced to slow down to just doing thing like hosting the popular HOLLYWOOD PALACE, producing the top-rated TV comedy HOGANS HEROES and playing SRO crowds in live appearances all over the World as he got richer and richer and played a lot of Golf. I’ll bet he was wishing he was Russ Columbo in those horrible, challenging, lonesome years. Then in those awful seventies, when he was past retirement age for any singing star, he was still rich, still working to the day he died (collapsing on a Golf Course in Spain, what a tragic, humiliating, sad and pathetic comedown for such a star), forgotten by the entire world that had once loved him.

Yep, and to see that talent gone to such seed, that he was doing stuff like dramatic performances in THE COUNTRY GIRL like he had never done before or making one of the best Road pictures, ROAD TO BALI with that other broken-down, barely working has been friend of his, Bob Hope. And it is truly embarrassing to see him in a supporting role in that 60’s Rat-Packer picture ROBIN AND THE SEVEN HOODS where, after an hour or so of some frankly lazy shuckin’ and jiving by Frankie, Dino, and Sammy, Der Bingle saunters in and effortlessly steals the whole picture from the gang without even so much as breaking a sweat. Yep, he’d lost it completely, forget Buster Keaton and the Beach Blanket Bingo pictures, this is the comedown of comedowns.

Yep, no matter how much success one can have for no matter how long, to ol’ Bob Fells, who’d probably have to mortgage his house to cover the grounds fees for eighteen holes at Pebble Beach, it just ain’t enough. Sorry Bing, the Nitratevile “experts” have given you the “thumbs down”.

Do these pinheads actually do any research, much less remember eras they actually may have lived through?


RICHARD M ROBERTS

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