No one in the mid-twentieth century was better known or more beloved than Bing Crosby, yet more than twenty-five years after his death he is often forgotten, or worse, misremembered. During the decade I spent researching his life I often thought of a theme that runs throughout the films of the great German filmmaker Fritz Lang: Nothing is what it seems. Of course, that's what Bing's detractors, including his eldest son and a biographer, told us when they revealed Crosby as a hard-drinking, child-beating, pinchpenny tyrant whose beloved persona was a carefully nourished fraud. When I wrote the initial proposal for my biography, I not only believed that he deserved to be knocked off the pedestal erected for him in the 1940s, but chose to develop the disconnect between public and private as a central theme. The idea of duality fascinated me. Here was a man perceived by the world as the soul of warmth but who in reality was cold, difficult, and remote. Among other things, that split would help define his achievement as the great actor he surely was.

Chiefly interested in Crosby as an artist, I wanted to defend the artistry against the irrational response that it, too, was somehow fraudulent. We live in an age of clay feet, and there are those who discount Frost and Hemingway because they were cruel and dishonest, or scorn the Roosevelts because Franklin and Eleanor were unfaithful. Entertainers are especially vulnerable to revisionist contempt; generations no longer vulnerable to their original charm may be indifferent to portrayals of Errol Flynn as a Nazi spy or Cary Grant as a self-hating closet-homosexual batterer. In time, of course, we learn to distinguish between art and artist, if the art continues to speak to us. Yet in the case of Crosby, the piling on had been relentless, perhaps because he had an especially long way to fall. No entertainer in our time has achieved quite the emotional hold Crosby had on his.