Kathryn Crosby, actress and guardian of husband Bing’s legacy, dies at 90

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 and 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.

“Are 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 on 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 .

Lee died of ovarian cancer in 1952, and Bing’s four sons from that marriage — Gary, twins Philip and Dennis, and Lindsay — became known for heavy drinking, self-destructive behavior and antipathy toward their father. Lindsay and Dennis died by suicide in 1989 and 1991, respectively. Kathryn had no role in raising the boys, all of whom were her contemporaries.

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 JR on the TV series “Dallas” — and spent five years completing a degree in registered nursing. She also was a 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, 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.

Long-festering family wounds were reopened with her decision, in 1982, to auction off a warehouse-full of Bing’s possessions and memorabilia. At the same time, books such as “Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man” (1981) by Donald Shepherd and Robert F. Slatzer and Gary Crosby’s “Going My Own Way” (1983, written with Ross Firestone), attempted to paint the singer as an abusive tyrant. Gary Crosby wrote, Bing ran a “house of terror” with vicious beatings for minor offenses, as well as heaping verbal abuse on the boys.

According to Giddins, those two books were filled with unsourced claims, outright fiction, and wildly misattributed quotes, and that Gary Crosby eventually recanted much of what he had written, but not before understanding relations even further with his siblings.

Mrs. Crosby became intensely protective of the Crosby name. When she felt the annual Crosby pro-am golf tournament in California had become too commercialized at the expense of her charitable mission, she broke with the PGA and started a new golf event in North Carolina, with proceeds going to college scholarships for public school students .

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 remains on being Mrs. Bing Crosby.”

Olive Kathryn Grandstaff was born in Houston on Nov. 25, 1933, and grew up in West Columbia, where her father was a high school football coach and her mother taught elementary school.

Her aunt, seeking to promote her clothing store, encouraged Kathryn to start modeling and appearing in bathing-beauty contests. With her Shirley Temple ringlets, she was voted “Miss Splash Day Princess” in Corpus Christi at age 3. She was attending the University of Texas as a drama student in 1952 when she was runner-up in the Miss Texas Pageant. One of the judges, who owned a chain of movie theaters, helped her get a screen test at Paramount.

Mrs. Crosby was married to Mr. William Sullivan, an educator who had been a Crosby estate trustee, from 2000 until his death in a single-car accident in Nevada in 2010 that also injured Mrs. Crosby. She leaves her children, Mary Frances, Harry and Nathaniel.

Mrs. Crosby saw her husband Bing as a serious artist and complex man whose personal flaws did not entirely define him. She learned to take his ribbing, even occasionally hurtful comments, as his form of endearment. Once, as she stood poised and elegantly gowned, her husband introduced her to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip as “Miss Fat Stock of 1950,” a reference to her Texas beauty queen days. It was a line he often deployed in public, and she learned to shrug it off.

“It won me $500 and a new car, so don’t knock it,” Mrs. Crosby later told a reporter about her husband’s quip. “Those titles bring a girl badly needed money, get her to meet people she’s never likely to meet otherwise, give her trips to places she might never see. Just a second place in Miss Texas got me to Hollywood.”