Silver Screen (Nov 1939 - May 1940)

76 Silver Screen for April 1940 YOUR EYES with this amazing neiy Cream Mascara Try this new, easy-to-use CAMILLE CREAM MASCARA. Just a touch outlines each separate lash with a shining smoothness, right down to the very tip. Makes your lashes look longer, silkier, your eyes bigger, beautifully expressive ! Won't smear. Won't break off your lashes. Stingproof and tearproof. Comes in smart, convenient, colored vanity that keeps your purse clean. Get CAMILLE MASCARA at your 10c store today, or send 10c, coin or stamps to CAMILLE, 53 East 21st Street, New York. SONG POEMS WANTED TO BE SET TO MUStC Free Examination. Send Your Poems To J. CHAS. McNeil A. B. MASTER OF MUSIC 5I0-V So. Alexandria Los Angeles, Calif. PINS 30i RINGS '1 Finest quality. Over 300 artistic designs. Write for our attractive free catalog and select a Ijeaulilul pin or ring for your class or club. OepLW, METAL ARTS CO., be., Rochesler, N. V. CJUl siT-me] STRONGER. MORE ABSORBENT TRY OUR NEW SITROUX BEAUTY CREAMS DO YOU WANT A SAMPLE .. .FREEl The best way to appreciate Silroux Cold Cream is to use it! That's why we offer this FREE SAMPLE. It's generous in size, and sent free on request. A postcard will do. Address: THE SITROUX COMPANY, INC. 468 Fourth Avenue, New York City, Dept 413 BUY SITROUX CREAMS WHERE YOU BUr SITROUX TISSUES If I Had My Life to Live Over [Continued from page 52] will tell you looking rueful about it all. "There I was with a fairly good start studying law, and what did I do? Set off for Los Angeles with another chap for no reason in the world except that we thought it would be fun. I took my drums along and thought I could earn some hamburgers with them. But to show you just how well heeled we were for this adventure— we had to trade the drums for gas before we got to L. A. So there we were, broke and drumless and a fine pair of gazabos we looked! "Of course, I'm not sorry I did it — now. If Fate's for you, she's for you and isn't going to be stopped even if you make a fool of yourself. We got a job with Mike Lyman and then Paul Whiteman heard us and gave us a job in his band. Just good luck. Not good sense on our part!" Good luck seems to have dogged Crosby as ill luck pursues some other people. He still gets notions — and sticks to them — about what he wants to do, how he wants to conduct his life and his career. Wise, experienced people wail that he is pig-headed, that this time he has surely picked the wrong horse. Two or three years ago when he started his series of broadcasts for the Kraft Music Hall, he flatly refused to have a studio audience. The wise boys were aghast. You had to have applause on a variety program to give an illusion of the theatre. That was just plain showmanship. Crosby opined that it was just plain eyewash. He wanted to do his best and the automatic, unspontaneous applause of an audience which had to applaud him whether it hked him or not, embarrassed and flustered him. He couldn't work that way and didn't propose to try. So, because they couldn't do anything else, they let him have his way. The Crosby luck (or should we begin to call it judgment at this poi?it?) held again. Listeners were downright relieved at the absence of ear-splitting bursts of clapping. Crosby fans went in a big way for the easy, informal progress of the Crosby programs, the spontaneity of Bing's unrehearsed verbal absurdities. Later on, when Bob Burns joined the program, they put one over on Bing. Explaining that Burns had to have audience reaction, they persuaded him to have some boys from a migrants' camp as guests at a broadcast. There was no applause, but there was easy laughter, and Bing didn't mind that. Since then there have been small, by-invitation-only audiences at all the broadcasts. But no clapping. Bing saunters about in his outlandish shirts and enjoys himself enormously while all the erstwhile calamity — howling "wise showmen" just feel silly. Bing is so sure now that luck is the most important thing in his life that he isn't a lad to ask for or take advice. Not any more. The only time he ever sought advice he rather overdid it and it didn't turn out so well ... at the time. It was when he left the Paul Whiteman band because Whiteman was going East and Bing decided that he wanted to stay in Los Angeles because he liked the climate. It was as simple as that. His well-wishers raised such an enormous wailing sound that time he was finally convinced that he must have made a ghastly mistake. He rushed about asking advice of practically everyone within hearing distance and when he finally received the radio offer which was to bring him to the threshold of real fame and money, he was disconcerted to find that all these people expected a cut of his prospective salary for the advice they had given him and which he hadn't used. There were more people than there was salary! "But even that was lucky," he recalls now. "It sure looked like a fool proceeding at the time, passing up a good job with Whiteman just because I liked Los Angeles. If I hadn't stayed here, I might never have met Dixie, for one thing. And it's possible that I might not have had the radio offer ... at least, right away. And even all the expensive advice I didn't take turned out to be a good thing in the long run. When I got myself all tied up in these deals my brother, Everett, who is a guy with a lot of sense, kind of took charge of things for me. And that was lucky for me. "First he paid off the $35,000 I seemed to owe the advisers. With that off my mind I decided to go fishing. Only I forgot to tell him. He was pretty irked with me when I got back, because it seemed the radio contract had been all ready for me to sign, only they couldn't find me. But even that turned out to be a good thing. During the delay they talked things over and he got a better deal for us than he might have i£ it could have been decided right off the bat. "You see? Doing so many things all wrong and having them turn out so right — wouldn't I be a sill at this point if I regretted any of it?" Well, wouldn't he? Bing has been especially lucky in the brothers God gave him. His two brothers, Everett and Larry, are sound business men and have managed to keep the Crosby affairs on an even keel. Shrewdly aware of the talent which is his, they are just as shrewdly able to help Mm sell it to the best advantage. They have their hands full with him sometimes and you'd think that they'd want to smack him. For instance, when he flatly dechned recently, to make a personal appearance in New York for twenty thousand dollars for one week — and then came home and transported his entire radio company to Spokane, at his own expense, for a broadcast for Gonzaga University, for nothing. But Bing is like that and everyone knows it and there is really no use for anyone to argue with him. His luck has held, and he has been right so often that it seems that it would be tempting Fate to cross a whim of his now. You could go on and on. His race horses. His race track. Various investments he has made light-heartedly, which looked extremely dubious on the face of them, all seem to have turned to profits. No wonder he has faith in his whims and 1 "A I Be