RIP: KATHRYN CROSBY

Kathryn Crosby, a 1950s Hollywood starlet who gave up her film career to marry Bing Crosby, the Oscar-winning actor, radio star and mellifluous “White Christmas” crooner, and as his widow became chief protector of his legacy, died Sept. 20 at her home in Hillsborough, Calif. She was 90.The death was announced in a statement by publicist B. Harlan Boll, who did not note a cause.

Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Kathryn Grant — as she was then known — dominated the Texas beauty contest circuit between Houston and Corpus Christi. A 5-foot-3, auburn-haired stunner, she was crowned “Golden Girl of the Texas Baseball League,” “Miss Buccaneer-Navy” (dressed in pirate motif) and “Queen of the Houston Rodeo and Fat Stock Exposition,” for which she was teased among rivals and friends alike as “Miss Fat Stock.”

She had met Crosby in 1953, a year after she was named first runner-up in the Miss Texas pageant and landed a Paramount studios contract. She was 20 at the time and was on the studio lot, breathlessly ferrying a load of petticoats to the wardrobe department, when she rushed past Crosby, then 50 and a recent widower. He was leaning against the doorjamb of his dressing room, casually whistling a tune.

"Howdy, Tex,” he asked with bemusement. “What’s your hurry?”

Crosby had been a box-office juggernaut on the lot for two decades, an audience favorite not only for his vaudeville-style “Road” movies with Bob Hope but also for his Oscar-winning turn as a singing priest in “Going My Way” (1944). In her spare time between walk-on roles, the starstruck young Kathryn filed dispatches for newspapers back home under the title “Texas Gal in Hollywood” and soon returned to Crosby to request an interview.

“You a reporter?” Crosby asked.

“I’m a columnist,” she said.

“The dickens you are,” he replied. “I didn’t know they came so pretty.”

Crosby agreed to the interview, then invited her to tea and later to dinner. She described an instant and mutual infatuation between herself and Crosby, who exuded a languorous sex appeal with his piercing blue eyes and the virile romantic baritone voice that had sold hundreds of millions of records, among them “Please” and “Pennies From Heaven.”

Their courtship lasted nearly four complicated years. Crosby disappeared from her life for months at a time and jilted her twice, only to emerge with reinvigorated ardor. As he pursued other on-set romances, including with actresses Grace Kelly and Inger Stevens, Kathryn was determined to focus on her own pursuit of stardom.

After being dropped by Paramount, she was picked up by Columbia studios and promoted as a versatile leading lady. She had a featured role as a card dealer in the anti-corruption drama “The Phenix City Story” (1955) and co-starred opposite Audie Murphy in the western “The Guns of Fort Petticoat,” Jack Lemmon in the military comedy “Operation Mad Ball” and Tony Curtis in the drama “Mister Cory,” all in 1957.

She was a princess in “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958), a trapeze artist in “The Big Circus” (1959) and, in perhaps her best performance, a surprise witness in “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959), holding her own in a cross-examination showdown with a slick attorney played by George C. Scott.

By the time Bing Crosby eloped with her to Las Vegas in 1957, Kathryn, a Methodist, had converted to Catholicism at his insistence but extracted a promise that she could continue her career after their marriage. But he soon reneged, preferring she stay at home as he wound down into semi-retirement and managed his many business interests and investments, ranging from baseball teams to thoroughbred horses to real estate.

She ultimately went along. Mrs. Crosby later said she wished to give her husband a life vastly different from his anguished and thoroughly dysfunctional first marriage, to actress Dixie Lee, whose alcoholism left him so despairing that he often stayed away from home, leaving her and his children to fend for themselves.

By the early 1960s, Bing and Kathryn had left Southern California and settled in a 24-room Norman-style mansion in Hillsborough, an upscale suburb of San Francisco. She had three children with Bing — including actress Mary Frances Crosby, whose character shot J.R. on the TV series “Dallas” — and spent five years completing a degree in registered nursing. She also was a public-school teacher, host of a morning TV talk show in San Francisco, and the author of a rosy 1967 memoir (“Bing and Other Things”).

She modeled clothes for designer Jean Louis, did occasional summer stock with Bing’s approval, accompanied her husband and children on bird-hunting and fishing expeditions and helped him manage his constellation of properties across the West and in Mexico. She vivaciously sang duets with Bing on TV specials, including his annual Christmas show, and appeared with their children in Minute Maid frozen orange juice commercials, a product Bing endorsed.

As a more contented spouse and father, Bing spent a great deal more time with his second family than he had with his first, Mrs. Crosby said. Nevertheless, she said, he could be a controlling and mercurial perfectionist at home, even as he tried to live up to the laid-back Mr. Lucky persona he had long cultivated — the charming and carefree all-American fellow who just happened to have a voice of peerless emotional resonance.

“He doesn’t exactly lose his temper in the traditional way,” Mrs. Crosby told an interviewer. “He just gets very quiet. That’s when I start wondering what I’ve done. You see, Bing will never say what is bothering him.”

With her nursing credentials, she looked closely after Bing’s well-being amid health setbacks, including after he plummeted 20 feet from a sound stage in March 1977 while rehearsing a TV show, seriously injuring his back. “She really took care of him,” said jazz critic Gary Giddins, an authoritative Bing biographer. Because she was emotionally stable and the family disciplinarian, he added, “She also allowed him to be the kind of father he had not been in the first marriage.”

In October 1977, he was on a golfing trip in Spain with friends when he died suddenly, at age 74 after a heart attack, just after completing a round of play.

Mrs. Crosby gradually restarted her acting career, mostly with touring theater companies and also in a cabaret act that paid tribute to Bing.

To tell her own story, Mrs. Crosby wrote “My Life With Bing” (1983) and “My Last Years with Bing” (2002). Of all the roles she would play — on screen and stage and in private life — she said there was one that made all the others possible. “I want you to understand,” she once told People magazine, “that my position in this world rests on being Mrs. Bing Crosby.

ARTICLE ARCHIVES: BING CROSBY

Here is an interesting People Magazine article which highlighted the auction of Bing Crosby's belongs by his wife in 1982. This article appeared in the magazine on May 31, 1982...

“I’m trying to keep my head above water. But you get to think that in India they had a good idea with the widow just throwing herself on the funeral pyre. It would have been simpler that way.”—Kathryn Grant Crosby

In life, he was Der Bingle, the ineffably relaxed and good-natured crooner whose ingratiating movies, records and TV specials made millions of dollars and left millions of Americans feeling better about themselves. But five years after his death, another, darker portrait has emerged of Bing Crosby: a distant and aloof father, an emotionless friend and, according to one 1981 biography, Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man, a person whom no one really knew. Both in life and in death the staunch protector of Bing’s reputation has been his strong-willed second wife, Kathryn Grant Crosby. Yet now, at 48, Bing’s ambitious and determined widow finds herself at the center of a controversy that is reopening some old wounds in the oft-troubled Crosby family.

At issue is Kathryn’s seemingly innocuous decision to auction off some of the possessions Bing had accumulated over the years in six homes. Four days this week, a San Francisco auction house will gavel down more than 14,000 items of Crosbyana. The lode includes everything from Bing’s golf clubs, fishing rods and shotguns to valuable English hunting paintings, his 1967 Aston Martin, his favorite photos (with Hope, Sinatra and Dempsey) and even his first recording (1926’s I’ve Got the Girl). Some of the items are startlingly personal: Bing’s pipes will go on sale, as will his platinum records for Silent Night and even the bed he and Kathryn shared during their 20 years of marriage.

“It was a very emotional time for me,” asserts Kathryn of the process of sorting out Bing’s things. “It was painful.” Bing’s bed, she says reverently, “still has his hair oil on it.” Of a favorite chair (also on the block), she asserts that “to sit in it and rub the wood that his fingers touched is very special.” The auction, she insists, was meant to be “a celebration. It’s for Bing. It has to be fun because that’s what he was all about. It’s important to share his things with the people who loved him.”

Kathryn says she discussed the sale with her children—Harry Lillis III, 23, a sometime actor and now a Fordham University business student, Mary Frances, 22, who played the conniving Kristin on Dallas, and Nathaniel, 20, last year’s U.S. amateur golf champion. As for Bing’s four sons by his first marriage, to Dixie Lee, who died in 1952, Kathryn says, “The older boys have been so good about it. They think this is the ideal thing to do.”

But not all of Bing’s family remember it that way. “I don’t know anything about the auction,” says son Dennis, 47. “She didn’t ask me to look through anything.” Nathaniel says, “I’m not sure what’s going on,” and admits he was “surprised” that Kathryn is selling some of his father’s old awards and trophies. “That bothers me,” he says. “I might have to have a talk with the little lady.” Then he hastily adds, “I don’t think she’s trying to tamper with Dad’s memory. I think my father’s belongings have somehow affected her progress in life. She has very vivid memories of him.”

Bing’s younger brother, Bob, 67, a bandleader, disgustedly calls the whole idea “a flea market; I’m horrified.” He says, “Kathryn never asked me or my sister [Mary Rose] if we wanted anything.” Dennis’ wife, Arleen, is even more blunt. “I’m fed up with all the lying and phoniness,” she says. “I tell my husband and his brothers, ‘For once, why don’t you guys be honest?’ But they say it’s just easier to lie to protect their dad’s name. My husband first heard of the auction in the newspapers. They all hate Kathryn; they really hate her. At one time Mary Frances and Kathryn weren’t even speaking. Kathryn’s not a very nice person. She’s a phony.” (Arleen, however, concedes that she has met Kathryn only twice in 17 years of marriage to Dennis.)

The fact is that there is little love lost among some of Bing’s bumptious first family. Gary, 48, and Dennis’ twin, Phillip, are openly hostile. “As far as I’m concerned, Phillip’s dead,” says Gary. “He isn’t worth the powder to blow him to hell.” Replies Phillip: “Gary has a two-by-four on his shoulder. He’s embarrassed his family too many goddamn times.” Only Gary and Lindsay, 44, will come up from their homes in the L.A. area to attend this week’s auction; Phillip and Dennis are staying away.

No one denies Kathryn’s right to do what she wants with Bing’s estate. “A lot of people want things that were Dad’s, and they don’t do anyone any good in the attic,” says Mary Frances. Several of Bing’s homes have been sold. “I was storing furniture everywhere,” Kathryn explains. “Some antique-dealer friends said, ‘Honey, why don’t you have a garage sale?’ ” Going through it all, she recalls, “I cried daily. I suddenly became the age I was when an item first entered my consciousness, like the top hat Bing wore the night in 1955 he took me to the Academy Awards.” She sees herself as the keeper of a special flame. “He was the man I loved,” Kathryn says, brimming with tears. “He was the man whose children I wanted to bear. And, miracle of miracles, that happened.”

Kathryn’s supporters say that she’s really paying the price of so loyally guarding Bing during his life. “She got the reputation of being a bitch when she was just doing what Bing wanted her to,” says Rosemary Clooney, a longtime family friend.

With typical determination, Kathryn carved out a series of professional lives apart from Bing’s. She earned a nursing degree, won a California teaching certificate, wrote her autobiography, hosted a half-hour TV talk show for three years in San Francisco, and appeared on many of Bing’s TV specials with their children. Her friend Rosemary Clooney recalls that “Bing lived in a very grand style, and for a little girl from Texas that was quite a jump. She wore black until she was 30 because she thought it was expected, being married to an older man. She went about it as a student—she studies and learns.”

She admits she was as exacting as Bing. “Nothing was ever enough,” she says. “I was never good enough. The children were never brilliant enough. Contentment is not in my nature, but maybe it’s time to be contented. I don’t have to make it perfect anymore. I’m not sure we had a great marriage, but we lasted 20 years and possibly would have gone 20 years more.” Then she backtracks. “My marriage was a great marriage. I think every wife should feel that way.”

Her first year of widowhood, she says, was “absolute lunacy. You lose all your married friends. You can’t go out with the same people or do the same things anymore. I survived by holding on to as much of Bing as I could. Since he traveled so much, I could pretend for a long time that he was coming back.”

Everyone grants Kathryn respect for the toughness she has shown since Bing’s death. “I can’t think of a person who needed less support than Kathryn,” says Phillip admiringly. “Kathryn believes the best way to get things is the pleasant way,” Gary adds, “but if she needs to she can hit you over the head with a hammer.” Even her friends concede that Kathryn can give the wrong impression. “She can have a lot of phoniness,” allows Ann Miller, her TV producer, “but I believe it’s because of what she thinks is expected of her. Kathryn is afraid to be Kathryn sometimes.”

These days Kathryn is redecorating the 24-room Crosby mansion in the tony San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough. Up early, often at 4 a.m., she writes and spends an hour with her bookkeeper, with whom she then plays a four-hour game of chess. She has written a biography of Bing (although a dissatisfied Simon & Schuster has sued to get its $33,000 advance back). She’s also resumed acting, touring with Same Time, Next Year and Guys and Dolls and playing at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre.

Kathryn says she does not date, though some friends have linked her romantically with Bill Sullivan, 56, a Yale-educated publisher of scholastic materials and Crosby chum who is a trustee of Bing’s estate. Arleen Crosby says they’re living together. Kathryn and her friends say firmly they’re simply old pals. “I don’t see myself marrying again,” Kathryn says. “I don’t even feel ‘come-hither’ anymore. After a certain point it’s all over.” “She doesn’t have a relationship, but I’m sure she dates people,” Clooney says. Kathryn, oddly heated, denies even that. The widow of the crooner who sold 400 million records is still wedded to one role. “I want you to understand,” she says with a stony look, “that my position in this world rests on being Mrs. Bing Crosby.”

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