Carroll Carroll; Writer Shaped Crosby’s Style

Carroll Carroll, a writer credited with creating Bing Crosby’s easygoing radio patter, has died at his West Hollywood home. He was 88.

Carroll, who also wrote advertisements, biographies and newspaper articles, died Tuesday of heart failure.

Crosby recalled his association with Carroll in his autobiography, “Call Me Lucky.”

“I fell into the hands of a man who took a personal interest in developing me,” he wrote. “He seemed to have an ear for the way I talked. The way we worked together resulted in the next best thing to ad-libbing.”

Carroll also wrote for the singer’s brother, Bob Crosby, and for George Burns and Gracie Allen, Guy Lombardo, Rudy Vallee and Milton Berle.

“I had to develop a different writing technique for Bing’s style of delivery because he wasn’t too keen about doing any speaking,” Carroll once told the Los Angeles Times. “He just wanted to get up and sing songs. His agents knew, however, that a person can sing just so many songs and then the public tires of it.”

Carroll was born Carroll S. Weinschenk in New York City, where he dropped out of high school to write.

Before joining the radio department of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, he contributed features and movie reviews to several magazines and newspapers, including the New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post, New York World and New York Evening Sun.

He moved west in 1946 to work for the Ward Wheelock Co. and was in charge of such radio shows as “Meet Corliss Archer” and Bob Crosby’s “Club 15.”

He later wrote his biography, “None of Your Business,” and ghosted others for Liberace, Ed McMahon, Mike Douglas and Henny Youngman. Carroll’s last book was “Life Is a Fortune Cookie” in 1981.

Survivors include a daughter, two sons and three grandchildren.