On a Friday evening in March five years ago, an event occurred on American network television that touched off what both Time and Newsweek would call the most frantic guessing game since the search for Watergate`s Deep Throat.
The program was ”Dallas,” and the question, darlin`, was, of course,
”Who shot J.R.?” Not even the cast members knew, it was widely written, and several different endings of the scene were shot to confuse the issue.
The answer was Kristin Shepard, J.R. Ewing`s sister-in-law/ex-lover whom he had promised he would marry but instead gave 24 hours to get out of town. Described by one writer as ”the coed vamp with a mean streak as deep as her cleavage,” she was played by, of all people, Bing Crosby`s little girl, Mary.
When it was finally revealed in November that Kristin had, indeed, drugged her alcoholic sister Sue Ellen, stolen her gun and headed off for the Ewing Oil Building, where she plugged Miss Ellie`s boy in the gut, viewership for a TV series set a record (later broken by the final episode of
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”M+A+S+H”), and Mary Crosby herself became an overnight sensation–what she likes to call ”the Flavor of the Month.”
”None of us expected the whole thing to take off the way it did,” the young actress is saying as she sits in a trailer parked on Randolph Street outside City Hall. ”The fact that nobody found out who did it during those eight months, and the fact that the momentum continued for so long, was just incredible.
”Of course, we knew who did it. Nobody actually told us, but people were saying to me things like, `Mary, make sure you have good publicity when this thing is over.` We did shoot the ending several ways–one time, Larry (Hagman) even got to shoot himself–but we knew. Obviously it was much more to our benefit to keep our mouths shut.”
Crosby was opening her mouth last week during a break in the filming of a movie of the week, ”Welcome to Our Night,” scheduled to be seen this fall on NBC, in which she and Richard Thomas play a small-town couple that comes to the big city and becomes involved in a night of terror.
”It`s a psychological drama–definitely not `The Out-of-Towners,` ” she stresses, referring to the 1970 comedy in which Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis have a rotten time in the Big Apple. ”Our film is serious. . . . Please, God, let it be serious.”
”It`s an unnamed city,” director Michael Pressman is quick to add. ”A northern city that`s decaying. Kind of like Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland.” Not Chicago, it goes without saying.
Crosby and Thomas are waiting for a scene that will be filmed in the depths of City Hall, with its tunnels being used as the supposed subway underbelly through which the couple flees from assorted villainous types.
”We`ll be running through all kinds of sewers and stuff for a week,”
she says with a grin. ”I mean, I really love your city, it`s beautiful, but I`m not exactly seeing the best parts of it. And it`s great to be playing with someone as talented as Richard. You know, there`s kind of a funny little twist. He`s now doing commercials for Minute Maid.”
To television viewers in the `60s and `70s, Mary was the cute little Crosby–Der Bingle`s only female offspring–who would do those orange juice spots as well as family Christmas specials with her father and mother, Kathryn. Now, she is 25 years old and still eager to do what the big boys do. ”Mary`s a real pro,” says Richard Thomas. ”She`s bright, beautiful and talented–and not a bit jaded.”
”She has an honesty and believability that just radiates on the screen,” adds director Pressman.
Prior to her experiences with the folks at the Southfork Ranch, Mary Frances Crosby had grown up in the San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough with her brothers, Harry Jr., now a New York businessman and Nathaniel, who is in his first year on the professional golf circuit.
Her father had decided that northern California would be a better atmosphere in which to bring up children than Los Angeles, where he and his first wife, Dixie Lee, reared their four sons, who later kept making headlines for their assorted divorces, drunk driving arrests and even a paternity suit. ”I was always a very precocious child,” she recalls. ”God, if I had had to raise me, I would have killed me. I also was a terrible tomboy. I still am. I play a mean game of football, basketball, baseball. I used to beat up my brothers. And–I hate to say it–I used to throw dolls out the window. Daddy taught me how to hunt and fish and then he`d look at me and say. `Wait a minute. She`s a girl. What am I doing?` ”
She made her acting debut at age 4 in a production of ”Peter Pan” with her actress mother, precociously was graduated from high school at the age of 15, and went on to the University of Texas, only to drop out after three semesters to apply to the prestigious American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where, at 16, she was the youngest student ever accepted.
While a student there, she received word that her father had died of a heart attack, at age 73, on a golf course in Madrid.
”He was very proud that I`d been the youngest ever at ACT, but was always very neutral about my becoming an actress. Obviously, he knew it was a tough business, with a lot of rejection and horrendous odds against making it. Growing up, I got both sides of the spectrum: the Christmas shows with all the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, and summer stock with my mother–the small roles and doing props and wardrobe. My parents taught us by example rather than their saying, `Do this, do that.` They were both the epitome of professionalism. They knew their lines, showed up on time and were never obnoxious.”
Once she arrived in Hollywood in 1978, she found that her name did open some doors, but that it was strictly up to her to get the job on her own merits. ”I don`t think nepotism plays as strong a part in the business as people think. Simply because there`s too much at stake–mostly money.”
Prior to landing the plum role on ”Dallas,” her first steady acting job had been on ”Brothers and Sisters,” a TV sitcom and ”Animal House” ripoff. ”It was terrible. The show wasn`t funny, and neither was I. After that I did some commercials and small jobs and then I auditioned for `Dallas`–along with the rest of L.A. and New York. Actually, the producers took a big chance. I mean, to cast Bing Crosby`s daughter–`White Christmas` and Minute Maid–as this nasty vamp. . . .
”I think Daddy would have been thrilled with my role–although initially it would have been, `Oh my God, my baby girl. . . .` But the one piece of advice he did give us was, `Do whatever you can, because that`s how you learn.` God knows, that lady was a stretch for me. I was such an innocent, old-fashioned girl. I`d take my script home and say to my husband, `Look at what they`re having me do! This is terrible!`
”I quickly learned through Larry Hagman what a joy it is to be a bitch. Of course, on my first day there was a seduction scene. Typical of Hollywood: `Hello, how are you, do you kiss to the right or left?` But Larry was incredibly giving. For example, they wanted him to pat me on the rump, and I told the director I wasn`t comfortable with that. Well, I got stomped. I mean, here`s this 19-year-old and all.
”Larry took me aside and said, `Look, if there`s something you don`t want to do, talk to me first.` Then he went to the director and said, `Having J.R. do that is tacky. Why don`t we do this instead?` And he came up with his stroking my back, which actually was 10 times sexier for both of us.”
After a year and a half on the show, Crosby`s character was killed off.
”That was fine with me, because I didn`t want to become typecast. It was five years before I accepted another nasty lady role–the one this year on
(ABC mini-series) `Hollywood Wives.` ”
In reality, she is a Malibu wife who doesn`t even live in the chic part of Malibu. ”We live down a dirt road, raise organic vegetables and Arabian horses–not the expensive kind–and I drive a Honda.”
She and writer Edmund (Eb) Lottimer married in the fall of `78 on the deck of their house in a self-designed, nonsectarian ceremony. The press had a field day with the fact that her mother wasn`t in attendance. ”She wasn`t there,” her daughter now asserts, ”because she was working–doing a national tour of `Same Time, Next Year,` and work will always come first. We`re very close. I adore her. But it was a difficult time because of all the publicity about `Bing`s daughter.` ”
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It traced back to 1977, when, during an interview with Barbara Walters, Bing had said he would disown his daughter if she ever lived with a man out of wedlock. Three months after her father`s death, the young couple moved in together.
”I knew Daddy had been very unhappy with the interview, because he felt he`d been painted into a corner. Which, of course, is why Barbara Walters has gotten where she is. The thing is, he came from a very stern Irish Catholic, Victorian upbringing, and I respected his wishes. I never would have done anything to hurt him, which is why we waited to live together. But after he died, I needed to do what was important to me.”
Despite Life magazine`s having once proclaimed Harry Lillis Crosby as
”incontestably, the No. 1 Big Family Man of Hollywood,” recent books have depicted him as a cold, tyrannical father.
”That`s totally, totally untrue,” Mary says. ”He was a very loving person, but his language of love was different from most people`s. He was shy, so it was hard for him to sit me on his lap or whatever. We used to go for long walks when we were in New York, and if he took my hand, that meant a lot. But we were loved, and knew it.”
She says ”My Life with Bing,” the 1983 book written by her mother, was ”terrific, a note of sunshine,” especially compared with ”Going My Own Way,” written the same year by her half-brother Gary, in which he paints Bing as a cruel martinet who ran a ”house of terror” and would do such things as beat his sons with a belt dotted with metal studs and label them with deprecating nicknames. (Gary himself was ”Bucket Butt.”)
”My vision of my father obviously is different from Gary`s,” she goes on. ”I also think his book wasn`t about Daddy, but about Gary–his own difficulties.
”I think that anybody who knew my father knew what a positive, good human being he was. I mean, I think most people now feel about Bing Crosby the same way they did before any of the books come out. Because you watch him act or you hear him sing and you get good feelings, and that`s what Daddy was about. You cannot make people feel as good as that and be a creep.”