Philip Crosby, 69; Entertainer, Son of Legendary Crooner

Philip Crosby, one of Bing Crosby’s twin sons -- and the last of the four sons from the legendary crooner’s first marriage -- has died. He was 69.

Crosby was found dead in his Woodland Hills home on Tuesday, according to Crosby family attorney Ed O’Sullivan. The Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Crosby died of natural causes.

Crosby’s four sons from his marriage to former jazz singer-actress Dixie Lee, who died of cancer in 1952, were Gary, Lindsay and twins Philip and Dennis. All four entered show business as young men and had varying degrees of success.

In the late ‘50s, the four brothers formed a nightclub act called the Crosby Boys and performed in Las Vegas and elsewhere, including on their father’s TV specials.

But the young Crosbys were known for getting into trouble with drinking and other problems, and Gary dropped out of the Crosby Boys in 1959 after a dressing-room brawl with his brothers in Montreal. He then launched a solo act, and his brothers continued performing as a trio.

Philip Crosby, who made some recordings and had small roles in films such as “Robin and the Seven Hoods” and “None but the Brave,” both starring Frank Sinatra, had a relatively short-lived show-business career.

In 1983, he told People magazine that he hadn’t performed in a year and that his last gig was at an Elks Club party in Burbank.

By then he had been married four times, the first three to Las Vegas showgirls.

He had also been arrested several times for drunk driving in 1980 and, despite 18 months of Alcoholics Anonymous, he told the magazine, “I don’t drink anymore -- but I don’t drink any less.”

Each of the Crosby brothers, according to the magazine article, received four-figure monthly checks from a trust fund established by their mother.

Born in Los Angeles in 1934, Philip Crosby and his brothers grew up in a 20-room mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood on the Westside, where they became fodder for their father’s publicity machine and posed for pictures in matching outfits.

The National Father’s Day Committee once honored Bing Crosby as “Hollywood’s Most Typical Father.”

But his image as the easygoing, all-American father was shattered decades later with the publication of Gary Crosby’s 1983 memoir “Going My Own Way.”

In the book, the eldest Crosby son portrayed Bing as a cold, aloof and abusive father who frequently beat his sons.

Both parents were strict disciplinarians. When Philip hid his bacon and eggs under a rug instead of finishing his breakfast, Gary Crosby wrote, their mother found the food and forced him to eat it, “dirt, hairs and all.”

And the punishment for not putting away their underwear was to tie the underwear in a string and wear it around their necks until bedtime.

But it was Bing’s job to provide the whippings for the most serious offenses and Gary, reportedly the most rebellious of the four brothers, received the most beatings.

As soon as their father got home and learned of the day’s offense, he told People, “I’d get bent over and my pants taken down and beat until I bled.” Gary Crosby’s book provoked what the magazine characterized as “a high-powered fraternal feud.”

“Gary is a whining ... crybaby, walking around with a 2-by-4 on his shoulder and just daring people to nudge it off,” Philip Crosby said at the time.

Dennis Crosby called the book “Gary’s business,” while brother Lindsay sided with Gary. “I’m glad he did it,” he said. “I hope it clears up a lot of the old lies and rumors.”

Philip Crosby disputed many of the revelations in his brother’s book but did not deny that his father believed in corporal punishment.

“We never got an extra whack or a cuff we didn’t deserve,” he told People.

After attending a strict, Jesuit-run boarding school south of San Francisco, he served a stint in the Army in the mid-1950s and attended what is now Washington State University in Pullman, where he was a guard on the football team.

Chuck Morrell, the team’s star fullback who shared a house with Crosby at the time, recalled that when Philip needed a car in college, his father had a driver deliver him a brand-new Chevrolet.

“He wasn’t snooty or anything,” Morrell, who remained lifelong friends with Crosby, told The Times on Friday. “He was a good, friendly guy and everybody liked him. You wouldn’t know he was Bing Crosby’s son.”

Bing Crosby died in 1977 at age 73. Lindsay Crosby committed suicide in 1989, as did Dennis Crosby two years later. Gary Crosby died from complications of lung cancer in 1995.

Philip Crosby is survived by four children: Mary Elizabeth Crosby, Dixie Lee Crosby, Flip Crosby and Philip Crosby Jr.; and three half-siblings from Bing Crosby’s second marriage, to Kathryn Grant: Harry Crosby, Mary Frances Crosby and Nathaniel Crosby.

A funeral Mass will be held at 7 p.m. Monday at Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills.