Rising star was jailed, and few knew

[snopes]

Decades before Paris Hilton and voracious media hordes anxiously awaited her release from County Jail, aspiring crooner Bing Crosby was quietly jailed with nary a mention in the newspapers. And after he became a star, his arrest and court records just as quietly vanished.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...,7745080.story

[Judecat]

So the LA times is basing their story on a hollywood gosip collum article from a newspaper, 25 years after the alleged incident, and quoting his brother "Harry", has a detail about seeing a game a month after the actual game was played, and it didn't make the papers at the time, and the records where eraised.

[Ramblin' Dave]

"Harry" was really Crosby himself - that's his real name. It doesn't sound like the LAT meant to mislead on that point, though. They just didn't know. And to me, it passes the smell test. I can see where he might misremember exactly who played the game in question all those years later, nor is it that surprising that arrest records would disappear in that much time, especially in the pre-computer era. If nothing else, somebody who worked where the records were stored may have stolen the records for a souvenir after Crosby became famous. (He had, by the way, already made a few records by then, though I don't know how popular they were. His first was in 1926.)

[Judecat]

It's not that the LA times got the name wrong that I had the problem with -- but the fact that they quoted a gossip column from 1955 that didn't know Harry was Bing himself. And the gossip column itself was written 25 years after the fact. Bing was big in 1955, and I'm sure everybody knew his name by then.

[snopes]

Originally Posted by Judecat

It's not that the LA times got the name wrong that I had the problem with -- but the fact that they quoted a gossip column from 1955 that didn't know Harry was Bing himself.

The Hollywood Reporter is an industry trade publication, not a gossip sheet. And it was the Los Angeles Times that misidentified the column's author as Bing Crosby's brother, not the Hollywood Reporter.

- snopes