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

Kathryn Crosby, a 1950s Hollywood starlet who gave up her film career to marry Bing Crosby, the Oscar-winning actor, radio star and mellifluous singer of “White Christmas,” and whose widow became the chief protector of her legacy after her eldest son’s damning memoir, died Friday at her home in Hillsborough, Calif. She was 90.

The death was announced in a statement by publicist B. Harlan Boll, who did not specify the cause.

Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Kathryn Grant—as she was then known—dominated the Texas pageant circuit between Houston and Corpus Christi. The 5-foot-11, auburn-haired, porcelain-skinned beauty was crowned “Golden Girl of the Texas Baseball League,” “Miss Buccaneer-Navy” (dressed in pirate-themed attire) and “Queen of the Houston Rodeo and Fat Stock Exposition,” earning her the nickname “Miss Fat Stock” from her rivals and friends.

She had met Crosby in 1953, a year after she had been named first runner-up in the Miss Texas pageant and landed a contract with Paramount Studios. She was 20 and on the studio lot, breathlessly carrying a load of petticoats to the costume department, when she passed Crosby, then 50 and recently widowed. He was leaning against the doorframe of his dressing room, whistling a tune nonchalantly.

“Hey, Tex,” he asked amusedly. “What’s the hurry?”

Crosby, who grew up in Spokane and attended Gonzaga University for three years, was a box-office giant for two decades, a favorite not only for his vaudeville “Road” films with Bob Hope but also for his Oscar-winning role as a singing priest in “Going My Way” (1944). In her spare time between walk-on roles, a star-struck young Kathryn wrote dispatches for newspapers back home under the headline “Texas Gal in Hollywood” and soon returned to Crosby asking for an interview.

“Are you a journalist?” Crosby asked.

“I’m a columnist,” she said.

“You’re a real asshole,” he replied. “I didn’t know they were so pretty.”

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

Their relationship lasted nearly four complicated years. Crosby disappeared from her life for months at a time and abandoned her twice, only to emerge with a renewed passion. While he pursued other romances on set, including with actresses Grace Kelly and Inger Stevens, Kathryn was determined to focus on her own quest for fame.

After being passed over by Paramount, she was picked up by Columbia Studios and promoted as a versatile leading actress. She had a major role as a card dealer in the anti-corruption drama “The Phoenix City Story” (1955) and co-starred with 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 Grand Circus” (1959) and, in perhaps her best performance, a surprise witness in “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959), holding her own under cross-examination from a wily lawyer played by George C. Scott.

When Bing Crosby eloped with her to Las Vegas in 1957, Kathryn, a Methodist, had converted to Catholicism at his insistence but obtained a promise that she could continue her career after they married. But he soon reneged on that promise, preferring that she stay home while he semi-retired and managed his many business interests and investments, ranging from baseball teams to thoroughbred horses to real estate.

She eventually agreed. Crosby later said she wanted to offer her husband a life very different from his anguished and totally dysfunctional first marriage to actress Dixie Lee, whose alcoholism left him so desperate that he often stayed away from home, leaving her and their children to fend for themselves.

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

A new life with Bing

In the early 1960s, Bing and Kathryn moved from Southern California to a 24-room Normandy-style mansion in Hillsborough, an upscale suburb of San Francisco. Kathryn and Bing had three children — including actress Mary Frances Crosby, whose character shot J.R. on the TV series “Dallas” — and spent five years earning a registered nurse’s degree. She also worked as a public school teacher, a San Francisco morning TV show host and the author of an upbeat 1967 memoir (“Bing and Other Things”).

She modeled for designer Jean Louis, walked occasional summer shows 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 sang lively duets with Bing on television specials, including his annual Christmas show, and appeared with their children in commercials for Minute Maid frozen orange juice, a Bing-endorsed product.

As a happier spouse and father, Bing spent much more time with his second family than with his first, Kathryn said. Still, she added, he could be a bossy, moody perfectionist at home, even as he tried to stay true to the easygoing Mr. Lucky persona he had long cultivated — the charming, carefree American who happened to have a voice of unparalleled emotional resonance.

“He doesn’t lose his temper in the traditional way,” Kathryn told a reporter. “He just gets really quiet. That’s when I start to wonder what I’ve done. You see, Bing will never say what’s bothering him.”

With her nursing qualifications, she kept a close eye on Bing’s well-being despite his health problems, including after he fell 20 feet from a film set in March 1977 while rehearsing a television show, seriously injuring his back. “She really took care of him,” said jazz critic Gary Giddins, an authoritative biographer of Bing. Because she was emotionally stable and the mistress of the family, he added,

“It also allowed him to be the kind of father he hadn’t been in his first marriage.”

In October 1977 he was on a golf trip to Spain with friends when he died suddenly, aged 74, of a heart attack, just after finishing a round.

Kathryn gradually resumed her acting career, mainly with touring theatre companies and also in a cabaret act paying tribute to Bing.

In 1982, Bing’s decision to auction off a warehouse full of Bing’s belongings and memorabilia reignited long-simmering family wounds. At the same time, books such as “Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man” (1981) by Donald Shepherd and Robert F. Slatzer and “Going My Own Way” (1983) by Gary Crosby, written with Ross Firestone, attempted to portray the singer as a violent tyrant. In contrast to his public image as an easygoing family man, Gary Crosby wrote that Bing ran a “house of terror” where he viciously beat boys for minor infractions and verbally abused them.

According to Giddins, both books were filled with unsourced claims, outright fiction, and widely misattributed quotes, and Gary Crosby eventually recanted much of what he had written, but not before further severing his relationship with his siblings.

Following the publicity surrounding the book, Kathryn Crosby became very protective of the Crosby name. When she felt that Crosby’s annual pro-am golf tournament in California had become too commercialized to the detriment of its charitable mission, she broke with the PGA and launched a new golf event in North Carolina, with proceeds going to college scholarships for public school students.

To tell her own story, she wrote “My Life with Bing” (1983) and “My Last Years with Bing” (2002). Of all the roles she has played – in film, on stage and in private life – she has said that 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 is based on being Mrs. Bing Crosby.”

Beauty contests

to act

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

Her aunt, eager to promote her clothing store, encouraged Kathryn to become a model and enter beauty pageants. With her Shirley Temple curls, she was crowned “Miss Splash Day Princess” in Corpus Christi at age 3. She was a drama major at the University of Texas in 1952 when she was first runner-up in the Miss Texas pageant. One of the judges, who owned a movie theater chain, helped her get a screen test at Paramount.

Kathryn Crosby was married to Mr. William Sullivan, an educator who served as administrator of Crosby’s estate, from 2000 until his death in a car accident in Nevada in 2010 that also injured her. She is survived by her children, Mary Frances, Harry and Nathaniel.

Kathryn Crosby saw her husband Bing as a serious artist and a complex man whose personal flaws did not entirely define him. She learned to take his teasing, and even his sometimes hurtful comments, as affection. One day, as she stood there, elegantly dressed, her husband introduced her to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip as “Miss Fat Stock 1950,” a reference to her time as a Texas beauty queen. It was a phrase he used often in public, and she learned not to mind.

“It got me $500 and a new car, so don’t worry about it,” she later told a reporter of her husband’s quip. “Those titles give a girl much-needed money, let her meet people she probably wouldn’t otherwise meet, let her travel to places she might never have seen. A mere second place at Miss Texas got me to Hollywood.”