By Benjamin Tumlinson
Columbia Historical Museum Board Member
Reflecting on a life well lived, Olive Kathryn Grandstaff Crosby beams with pride knowing her childhood dreams were achieved. The little girl who used to swing in the backyard hammock on East Bernard Street and gaze through the canopy of oak and pecan leaves at the clouds overhead, envisioning a future life in Hollywood as a big movie star, eventually reached heights as an actress on the big screen only the best script writers could dream up.
Now in her 88th year, that little girl from West Columbia has authored seven books (see book titles below) detailing her memories of competing for TV and movie roles with other young starlets, marrying an entertainment legend and, most importantly to our readers, writing about her childhood years as a resident of West Columbia.
Just about everyone knows her as Kathryn Crosby, widow of Oscar and Grammy winner Bing Crosby, but before exchanging vows at St. Anne’s Catholic Church in Las Vegas on October 24, 1957, the two movie stars were involved in a romance that ebbed and flowed over a four-year span. The major roadblock preventing them from walking down the aisle remained their drastic age difference.
Rumor has it that Kathryn’s dad, former Roughnecks Head Football Coach Delbert Emery Grandstaff, took issue with der Bingle referring to him as “Dad” following their marriage. Crosby was only five years younger than Kathryn’s father. While Kathryn was still in her 20s, the groom was 54.
West Columbians filled the seats at the old Capitol Theater in the 1950s when their hometown girl’s name was adorning the movie posters outside the picture show. It was a much bigger event on November 7, 1957, when little Kathryn, all grown up, brought her big-star husband for a wedding reception at the home of Bing’s new in-laws. Local residents rushed to the Grandstaffs’ house in West Columbia with hopes of shaking his hand and getting to talk to Crosby. The Grandstaffs lived where the vacant lot is now across East Bernard Street from Pet Pleasers dog grooming shop.
Kathryn’s mother, Olive Grandstaff, was a second-grade teacher at West Columbia Elementary School while her father was a four-term Brazoria County commissioner after previously serving as a West Columbia High School government teacher and coach. Born in Pollock, Louisiana, in 1898, Delbert Grandstaff met Olive Stokley as students at Humble High School in Texas. He was a senior and Olive was a sophomore when he joined the Marines six weeks before graduation and found himself hoping to return home alive from Europe in World War I. Delbert and Olive married in 1920 and came to West Columbia, following Olive’s father who was transferred by the Texas Company from Humble to their new oil field near West Columbia.
Kathryn’s parents began their teaching careers at the West Columbia school in the early 1920s when all the grades, from elementary to high school, were housed in the same two-story building just down the street from the Grandstaff’s home.
Kathryn writes in her 1967 autobiography, “Bing and Other Things” (Meredith Press, New York), about how much she loved growing up in West Columbia. She got the entertainment bug in elementary school when she sang “On the Good Ship Lollipop” in the school play, “The Toy Maker’s Dream.”
Before she became a Hollywood dream girl, Kathryn experienced a string of successes in beauty pageants. Her first trophy was secured at the tender age of 3 when her aunt, Frances Sullivan, entered her in the “Splash Day Princess” bathing beauty contest in Corpus Christi. As a teenager, Kathryn rotated between living in Robstown with her aunt and uncle, Frances and Leon Sullivan, and her parents in West Columbia. She graduated from Robstown High School while taking dancing and ballet lessons in Corpus Christi.
Her string of pageant victories as a teenager included being named Texas Baseball League queen and Houston Fat Stock Show queen. What spurred her to pursue her dream of being a movie star occurred in Galveston in 1950 when Kathryn was first runner-up in the Miss Texas Pageant. Although Connie Hopping wore the Miss Texas crown at that pageant, it was the pretty girl from West Columbia who caught the eye of a Hollywood talent scout.
She changed her name for movie and TV roles to Kathryn Grant and bought a one-way ticket to Hollywood. After attending The University of Texas in Austin for a while, taking acting classes and performing in plays, the young beauty queen appeared in minor movie roles until the mid-1950s when more meatier roles began to come her way.
“My acting career was unfolding slowly but steadily with good parts in movies and TV shows,” Kathryn wrote in her 1983 book “My Life with Bing.”
She first met her future husband when Bing agreed to let her interview him in his dressing room on the set of the 1953 film “White Christmas.” Kathryn auditioned unsuccessfully for a minor role in the movie but impressed the film’s star while feeding him questions for her newspaper column, “A Texas Gal in Hollywood.”
Crosby was still mourning the 1952 death of his wife, Dixie Lee Crosby, from a battle with cancer. Bing and Kathryn dated off-and-on while working on separate movie projects. Kathryn appeared in several films with Academy Award winners like Bette Davis, Charlton Heston, Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly, Anthony Quinn and Jack Lemmon.
A really big deal for a girl from West Columbia was attending the 1955 Academy Awards on the arm of one of the nominees for best actor. Kathryn writes in her 1983 autobiography that “I sat with clenched teeth while Marlon Brando accepted his Best Actor award for “On the Waterfront”. To my mind he was good, but Bing was better in “The Country Girl”. I felt a real sense of loss, but Bing remained unruffled.”
Bing won his only Oscar for 1944’s “Going My Way” and was nominated again for that film’s sequel, 1945’s “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” When Bing accompanied his new bride to West Columbia in 1957, he had been nominated for three best actor Oscars, recorded 23 gold and platinum records, and topped the world in most movie tickets sold for five consecutive years from 1944 to 1948. He was a really big deal.
After marrying Bing, Kathryn’s appearances in movies slowed to a snail’s pace. She had costarring roles in several Hollywood films like “The Guns of Fort Petticoat” with Audie Murphy, “Operation Mad Ball” with Lemmon and Mickey Rooney, “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad” with Kerwin Mathews and one of the biggest roles of her career in “Anatomy of a Murder” with Oscar winners Stewart and George C. Scott. Her choice to become a stay-at-home mother to the couple’s three children, Harry, Mary and Nathaniel, became a mutual decision.
Bing was presented the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1962 and, in a 2000 American survey, he was voted the third most popular movie actor of all time behind only Clark Gable and John Wayne.
Harry Lillis “Bing” Crosby Jr. died at the age of 74 while playing golf in Alcobendas, Spain. He made more than 70 feature films and recorded more than 1,600 songs in his illustrious entertainment career. Older West Columbians will remember his visits to his wife’s hometown; he and Kathryn entertaining children on stage at West Columbia Elementary School where Bing’s mother-in-law was a teacher, and being glued to their TV sets every December to catch a glimpse of West Columbia’s own Kathryn Grandstaff on Bing Crosby’s Christmas specials.
Kathryn and Bing were married for nearly 20 years before his 1977 death. When she was 77, Kathryn sustained serious injuries in a traffic accident near Placerville, California, that killed her second husband, Maurice William Sullivan. He was 85 when he sustained fatal injuries, and Kathryn was flown by helicopter to a Reno, Nevada, hospital for treatment.
Her mother also was killed in a traffic accident in 1970 while visiting her daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren in California. Kathryn’s father lived to be 98 years old. He died in 1997. Kathryn’s brother, Emery Grandstaff, died in 2003 at age 77, and her older sister, Frances Ruth Meyer, passed away earlier this year.
Books by Kathryn Crosby
- Bing and Other Things (1967)
- My Life with Bing (1983)
- Kathryn Crosby’s State Fair Cookbook (1995)
- My Last Years with Bing (2002)
- My First Years with Bing (2004)
- My Last Years with Bing Part One – 1960s (2012)
- My Last Years with Bing Part Two – covers 1970-1977 (2012)
Film Appearances
- So This is Love (1953)
- Arrowhead (1953)
- Forever Female (1953)
- Casanova’s Big Night (1954)
- Living It Up (1954)
- Rear Window (1954)
- Unchained (1955)
- Tight Spot (1955)
- Cell 2455 Death Row (1955)
- 5 Against the House (1955)
- The Phenix City Story (1955)
- My Sister Eileen (1955)
- Storm Center (1956)
- Reprisal! (1956)
- The Wild Party (1956)
- Mister Cory (1957)
- The Guns of Fort Petticoat (1957)
- The Night the World Exploded (1957)
- Operation Mad Ball (1957)
- The Brothers Rico (1957)
- Gunman’s Walk (1958)
- The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
- Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
- The Big Circus (1959)
- 1001 Arabian Nights (1959)
- Goldilocks – animated (1970)
- Queen of the Lot (2010)
Television
- The Bing Crosby Show (1964-1965)
- The Kathryn Crosby Show (1970s)
Broadway
- State Fair
Fun Facts
- A bridge carrying U.S. Route 158 over the Yadkin River in North Carolina is named for Kathryn Crosby
- On June 16, 1963, Kathryn received her nursing cap after studying at Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles.
