That moment when Bing Crosby sold all his 65 race horses to help raise inheritance tax on his wife's estate

 

MANY rainbows have tipped the years of Bing Crosby's colorful life-and with a pot of gold at the end of most of them.

If you believe in odds, it's only once in a decade that a human being comes along and finds that everything he touches turns to currency!

Such a man is Bing.

Over a long period of time he has discovered un- erringly the short cuts to becoming, if you want to coin a bromide, a Croesus.

Today, that Midas Touch has escaped many people. But not Bing. And never, in fact, has it been more apparent than now-when his new Paramount picture, "Little Boy Lost," is likely to swamp, with more gold, the box-office tills of the movie theatres the world over and Bing's pockets, too.

Not, mind you, that Bing needs another movie hit, another silver mine, another gilt-edged gimmick to make him not only one of the richest men in the nation, but one of the world's most successful business men.

Bing's personal fortune today-and strange as it seems, the least of it comes from his motion picture endeavors-is variously computed at between $5,000,- 000 and $10,000,000. Like the Aga Khan, Mr. Crosby seems worth his weight in gold. But cannily, he refuses to be weighed!

With all this immense wealth, recent stories of how Bing was forced to sell his 65 race horses to help raise $1,000,000 inheritance tax on his wife's estate, surprised many people. He even put on the market his Holmby Hills mansion and his Summer home at Pebble Beach. "The tax is close to a million, so Bing has to liquidate some properties," his brother Larry, head of Crosby Enterprises, Inc., explained. 

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Screenland and TV-Land, November 1953