FOR the last decade, whenever I mentioned to anyone that I was working on a life of Bing Crosby, the usual response was, ''Why?'' I can't say I was surprised. For 30 years, between 1927 and 1956, Crosby was a looming presence in America's cultural landscape. At the peak of his career, in the 1930's and 1940's, he was thought by many to be the most famous American alive. For much of that period, he was undoubtedly the most admired. The cycle of ''Road'' pictures with Bob Hope established Crosby as a great comic actor. Yet by the 1960's, the ocean began to roll over Der Bingle, and though he continued to sell millions of records -- chiefly holiday songs -- he had morphed into a grand old man while retaining little of the bite of his contemporary, Louis Armstrong, or his aging offspring, Frank Sinatra. Crosby's reputation faltered along with his music after his death, in 1977. When his eldest son, Gary Crosby, published a bitter memoir describing the unflappable Bing administering vigorous corporal punishment, his halo tilted and crashed. Soon the afterlife of his career imploded. Jazz lovers kept his memory alive, mainly because of his early records and the later collaborations with Armstrong, Louis Jordan, Les Paul and others. But jazz lovers are by nature classicists, and Crosby had spent most of his life on the other side of the divide: the pop world, where success is measured in numbers -- a world remade by rock, in which even the oldest of oldies postdate ''Heartbreak Hotel.''

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