Customer Reviews

Call Me Lucky

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Bing Crosby comes to life in "Call Me Lucy". Each word, each sentence, every portion evokes Crosby's wonderful exalted form of speaking. This is not a tell-all biography, but rather a wonderful recant of anecdotes and humorous observations. Crosby tells amusing stories of Bob Hope, Paul Whiteman, Oscar Levant, Groucho Marx, Al Jolson, Fred Astaire, his wife, and his kids. He also spends time telling stories of his adventures on the golf course, in movies, on radio, and traveling the country with Paul Whiteman's band. What's more, he tells the true stories of his rise to the top of show business. From being a team with his Washington pal Al Rinker, to getting the Academy Award for "Going My Way" in 1944. In addition to this, he speaks frankly about his wife (who died not to long before the book was originally published). An honest, and teary moment. All together, "Call Me Lucky" is a must to any Crosby fan. It's undeniably Crosby!

Pete Martin, the famous journalist and profile writer who spent a lot of his time working like a beaver for the classic Saturday Evening Post of the 1940s and 1950s--the Norman Rockwell years--and who departed for LOOK magazine when Rockwell did--wrote the bulk of this book, but he did it in close cooperation with the not always easy to work with Bing Crosby, who had attained a new plateau of popularity in the 1950s (when the book was first published). It seemed as if he had everything: wonderful talent, a devoted family, a gift not only for musical comedy but for drama too, as his turns in The Country Girl and Going My Way indicated. Though filmed considerably later than the period he describes in this book, "der Bingle" did a great job as a serial killer in Ira Levin's medical thriller, Dr. Cook's Garden. Bing had a warm, jazz-inspired delivery that wrapped itself around air like it was filled with honey, he was surely the warmest singer who ever lived. If his private life was more complicated than the Saturday Evening Post was then willing to print, what we have in CALL ME LUCKY is another side to the many-faceted Bing Crosby, a construction of grit, daring and tenderness that remains remarkably durable twenty years after his death.

I read this book as a teen years ago and just purchased the new paperback version. Bing's voice, even as filtered by Pete Martin, is evident here. He's not a deep 'teller of tales' in order to let us see all his personal angst. What we do see is a guy who struggles with parenting spirited boys, who grieves the loss of a wife, who downplays his talent and, as the book's title suggests, considers himself merely lucky. There's a lot of humor in this book and the caring Crosby feels for his family and his fellow entertainers is quite evident if not overly 'blatant'. Another perfect companion to the Gary Giddins book "Pocketful of Dreams"!

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Crosby says about himself that he had no skill at acting or dancing and that his singing was more gimmick than talent, a strategy learned in vaudeville. If he hadn't been in town at the same time as Paul Whiteman, his life would have taken a different turn, and that would have been okay with him. As it was, he blew around in a wind that carried him to fame, fortune, race tracks, golf courses and professional friends. Otherwise, he made no contribution, he says, except for two recordings, and he isn't kidding. What we have here is a modest little man with a great deal to be modest about. Vain, conceited, self-centered, pretentious, affable--what media turns into icon. The book itself is a series of anecdotes distilled from conversations with a ghostwriter, interrupted when Bing swaps a highbrow word for a lowbrow one, reaching for distinction. He had an ache for attention, evidently, but his book never deals with the hungers of his personality. So he's not as interesting as the people he mentions, sometimes indiscretely, despite his own penchant for privacy. It was a wonderful ride. I'm glad he enjoyed it. But yesteryear's wisecrack is this year's yawn. For a show biz autobiography that sizzles with self-knowledge, read Oscar Levant's or Lennie Bruce's.