'SILENT NIGHT' STILL POURS ROYALTIES INTO CHARITY

I meet Bing
on the
Seventh `Road'
By HUGH KAY
IT was a strange experience to walk into a film studio for the first time and find oneself in a Christian atmosphere. I don't quite know what I was looking for—something to do, I suppose, with hard faced professional liars, slick pornographers, and sin-laden stars prancing around with a temperature.
As it happened, Shepperton on a mellow autumn day wore a curious air of relaxed hustle. It was a bit like the back benches in church, everyone talked in unperturbed undertones.
The duenna of press and publicity pomps, pockets stuffed with pencils and paper, turned out to he a winning Scots Congregationalist whose knack is to ration her lip-and have everyone just where she wants them. Including me.
EVEN the breeze hetween the studios told you that Bing Crosby was a Catholic, Bob Hope married to one and himself a Presbyterian, both of them good family men, both of them generous givers, masters of the belly-laugh, never of the snigger.
On the set of the "Road to Hong Kong", the actor became a craftsman as well as an artist. It has been said that a journalist is simply a workman using words instead of bricks and mortar. The same seemed true of the film actor, whose slightest twitch, relentlessly probed by the camera, tells or betrays a whole story.
It was in a white painted but in the corner of the studio—rather like a works manager's office on a building site—that I found Bing at his ease in a low slung chair, a 'phone at his side, his make-up and costume casualty worn, reading the papers and puffing at his long-stemmed pipe.
Only a few jars of expensive looking grease paint and a spacesuit hanging baggily from a hook made it look like a dressing room.
IDOUBT if he smiled more than once the whole time we talked, and then with that slow, half-reluctant, oncsided effort that has meant more to
the world for 25 years than the biggest and broadest of beams.
Behind Bing's song and laughter is an unpretentious but deeply serious mind, the mind of an intensely human person utterly unimpressed by a generation of world-wide adulation, and one who has taken his share of the knocks, This is a man intent on being ordinary, not as a gag, but because he believes himself ordinary, and, while deeply respectful of scholarship, finds virtue in being himself.
Refusing to attribute to' himself more than a working ability to do his own professional job, he talks more of Bob than of himself. It's the one subject sure to make him sparkle, however he feels.
Slow to speak, always with deliberation and a convincing simplicity, he gives you the feeling he'd have made a good lawyer if he'd stuck at it.
ABOVE all else, Bing is every bit the Jesuit boy, the son of St. Ignatius, and mighty proud of it.
"I studied at Gonzaga University. Washington" -he calls it Gonzayga—"where the professors are Jesuits, and half of them scholastics, not yet priests. My four brothers were taught by the Jesuits too. So I made many Jesuit friends.
"Some of my classmates, also, are now well-known members of the Society, like Fr. Francis Corkery, who later became Rector of the University, and does a fine job for the Church, especially in his relations with non-Catholics."
Did he agree that the Catholic Universities in America were really the "Red-Bricks" of the United States, with standards not quite up to the secular university level. He wouldn't have it at all. "The standards arc very high, and the Gonzaga law faculty is one of the finest in the country." And within the Jesuit circle itself, the alumnus of Gonzaga was not prepared to concede superiority to Fordham, St. Louis or Marquette. What turned him off law?
"I didn't finish the course. As part of the `noviceship' I had to work in a lawyer's office in town. But I was singing, even then. And I suddenly realised that i was making more money than the lawyer. It seemed time to make a change."
HIS performances as a priest in his films seemed to suggest that he had stumbled on a formula for getting through with spiritual ideas to a sophisticated generation of young people. Had he thought this one out?
"Not consciously. In fact, I was shaken when it was first put to me that I should play a priest. But. indirectly, I suppose it was the familiarity I had with so many Jesuit teachers and friends that coloured my approach to the priest in 'Going My Way'. "You see, those scholastics at Gonzaga were both friends and spiritual counsellors." They were very much part of us. I've known a scholastic give a student a bit of a push, only to be told that he wouldn't have done that if he hadn't a collar on.
"One swift tug, and the scholastic would say: 'Well, I haven't got it on now; so what?' And he'd muscle right in. 'This easy relationship with priests and religious is not always understood. It has a special North American quality. We had a lot of trouble getting 'Going My Way' into Latin America, because at one point of the story I wore a baseball cap and a sweat shirt, and this, in some quarters, is not expected of a priest!"
BEHIND good comedy there seems to lie a world of experience and of suffering, sometimes ever a certain contempt of humanity. something a little cruel and twisted.
"If you mean the 'sick' comedians like Mort Sahl, you've got a point." But I didn't mean Mort Sahl. I meant the hardness behind the twinkle in a man like Bob Hope. "I'm astonished you should say that about Bob. He's a real funny man even off stage. especially when he's with his children.
"Actually, comedy to him is a business. You should sec his files of jokes—jokes about politicians, jokes about golf and cricket, jokes about a whole range of subjects, all neatly organised. He'll always look up a gag to make sure it hasn't been used before,"
HOW does a comedian or light singer manage to turn on his enthusiasm like a tap, even when he feels browned off? (One of the greatest mysteries of life to me.)
"Oh, I suppose you just get into a rhythm. I've known Bob come to the theatre dragging his feet behind him; but the moment he got on that stage he was off like a bomb."
Bob Hope's charities are a byword, like his support of Clubland in London's East End (and he does a lot more than the public will ever know); Bing's own generosity is the same (the record of "Silent Night" still pours royalties into a special work run by nuns; the story is that they asked his help when he was hard up, and the best he could do was to give them his latest record) HDA Bob Hope any real Christian conviction or was he just a kind man?
"Bob is a Presbyterian. 1 don't really know why he isn't a Catholic. I've always hoped he would come into the Church. His wife is a Catholic, of course, and he has many priests among his friends. I suppose he just hasn't had the faith given to him." How does Bing see his own faith? There was something very simple and very moving about the way he said quietly: "My religion is the biggest thing in my life." Does the social phenomenon of modern youth's worship of the denti-gods of screen and stage cause him any disquiet — the thought that some people even model themselves on him?
This time he really did laugh.
"I doubt whether anyone models himself on me. But, yes, I do take your point. I've tried to live in such a way that I wouldn't disappoint anybody in their opinion of me. I've done wrong things. I've misbehaved. But I think I can truly say that I'm sorry."
BINGE has lived a thoroughly good Catholic life. Does he think the film world is really a menace to an actor's faith?
"Faith must always he strong. It needs to he very strong in this business. But. if you've really got a strong faith, thsre's no reason why you shouldn't he all right." Bing has the secret of perennial youth. But has he thought more in terms of serious parts in recent years?
"I once made a film called 'Man on Fire'. I thought it was a very good little film. The theme was very serious. concerning family relationships, and I did not sing. But we never managed to do anything with it. T suppose people have got too used to me in one sort of dimension."
Any special .message for the readers at Christmas?
"It's all been said. . . . it's all been said. . . . But I would like to put up one more plea to people not to commercialise Christmas too much. Get the real Christmas story right into the children when they're very young. We had it. It meant a lot to us."
So back to the seventh of the "Road" films, this time to take the mickey out of the science fiction stories, to put Khrushchev in his place, to reduce world tension to a sane perspective, to remind us that the biggest bomb dissolves in a laugh and a song from a heart with sonic love in it. Though I don't suppose Btng would put it quite that way.