Kathleen Crowley

01/09/2017

http://www.missnews.com.br/historia/kathleen-crowley/

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Tom Weaver Sep 1, 2017 


In 1958, columnist Earl Wilson referenced TV and movie star Crowley’s humble beginnings, calling her “a little country girl who got some training from a minister’s wife and won ‘Miss New Jersey of 1949.’”


14 – Producers Jules V. Levy and Arthur Gardner saw Crowley in an episode of TV’s Maverick and signed her for the female lead in the sci-fi adventure The Flame Barrier. Her main memory of that movie: Co-star Arthur Franz insulted her in her own home in pre-production.


NOW … all the other shots are closeups or head shots or whatever, and I don’t even know what they’re from. Here’s ONE caption you can use with any one of them:


Lump the two TARGET EARTH shots together with one caption:


In the shot on the LEFT (OR WHATEVER), the cast and crew of Target Earth: Producer Herman Cohen is seated on the floor in suit and tie, with the movie’s star Richard Denning behind him and Crowley behind Denning. In the photo on the RIGHT (OR WHATEVER), Crowley’s in a pinch as she and Denning cower before a monstrous robot from Venus.


There’s a place in New Jersey where, despite its proximity to New York City and Philadelphia, the hand of time has touched but lightly: the Pine Barrens. A thousand square miles of heavy forests, swamps and marshland, it’s filled with ghost towns and communities so obscure, they don’t appear on many maps. A flying monster, “The Jersey Devil,” has legendarily haunted the area since the 1700s when it was born of a local woman (her 13th child), killed the midwife and flew up the chimney and out into Jersey folklore. Electricity got to the Pinelands in the 1950s and ’60s. According to a Charles Hillinger New York Times article from 1986, some of its denizens (“Pineys”) have Elizabethan speech patterns. One of Hillinger’s interviewees told him that when you cross the Green Bank Bridge over the Mullica River, “you go back 50 years in time. People here have their own way of thinking, their own way of life.”


A product of this great wilderness, Kathleen Crowley became Miss New Jersey in 1949. Then, unlike many Pineys who never leave the vicinity of their residences (“some live so far in the woods that they have never seen a neighbor's home”: New York Times, 1999), Crowley became a New York TV actress and a Hollywood TV and movie star. But after two decades, she returned to her South Jersey roots—and in fact became the drawbridge tender at the abovementioned Green Bank Bridge.


On the day after Christmas 1929, Betty Jane Kathleen Crowley was born in Green Bank, a small community outside of the not-much-bigger Egg Harbor. She grew up during the Great Depression when (according to one of Hillinger’s interviewees) some Pineys still lived off the land, eating “most any wild animal they could get their hands on, muskrat, raccoon, even skunk.” Her father Birdsall “Bert” Crowley had a mail route; over the years, he also delivered coal, ice and milk. Kathleen told me that thoughts of becoming an actress started going around in her head at around age ten: “I grew up with a good family in a good home, but never would my father have thought of allowing me to leave to do anything like that! I was the only little girl in the neighborhood and I didn't have dolls, I climbed trees and walked in the woods and did things like that—I had a lot of time to imagine things. I had quite an imagination because of being a bit of a loner as a child.” A 1946 graduate of Egg Harbor High School, she taught Sunday school at the Green Bank Methodist Church and was in charge of the church choir. The teenager worked in Egg Harbor as secretary and bookkeeper at the Better Bilt Door Company.


A few years earlier, 1945, Crowley had listened to the Miss America pageant on the radio and knew that winner Bess Myerson had received a $5000 scholarship; now, at 19, she wondered if her ticket out of the backwoods might be a pageant win, scholarship money and acting studies. When a little local pageant was put together, “my father would not allow me to enter; no daughter of his was ever going to parade up and down in a convention hall in a bathing suit. He had to be tricked into allowing me to enter!” Crowley (110 pounds, 5’2½” in her nylons) participated in this pint-sized pageant on June 30, 1949, held in the Mays Landing High School auditorium. Eleven girls competed in four phases of competition: evening gown, talent, bathing suit and personality. In the talent competition, Crowley sang “Mighty Lak’ a Rose”; one of the judges, Vineland Times Journal columnist Del Brandt, wrote that she “barely got a passing grade” for her rendition. But at the end of the night, the blue-eyed brunette was Miss Egg Harbor. Her prize: a $250 scholarship award and the chance to vie for the title of Miss New Jersey. At that August 7 competition in Asbury Park, Crowley racked up her second win: She was designated the Garden State’s prize rose, prevailing over a field of 13 other lovelies.


Next stop: the annual Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, just 13 miles from Egg Harbor via the Atlantic City Expressway, held on Saturday, September 10, 1949. But Miss New Jersey placed sixth. In an interview Crowley gave the Asbury Park Press in 2000, she made it sound like she did not expect to win the Big One: “I wasn’t one of those child prodigies. I grew up climbing trees and swimming the Mullica River. [The other Miss America contestants] all had talent and the dimensions I only dreamed of having. They were tall, bosomy, curvaceous.” But there was a consolation prize: After a tie vote, she and Miss Montana shared the honor of the title Miss Congeniality. “To me, that was Miss America without the responsibility. That meant a great deal to me. You're voted by the girls – not judges – how they see you. They see you as you really are.”


Even more importantly, her bank account was now full of prize money and she made tracks for New York City and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.


**START OF EXTRACT-------------------


Ten days later Mike Todd offered me a job in one of his musicals. I turned it down because I wanted to be a dramatic actress. But the going was tough. I did modeling to augment my slender scholarship fund and to pay for the extra classes. I’d hate to tell you how often my dinner consisted of a bowl of bouillon. Once I went 120 days without work. I couldn’t pay my room rent and on top of it all, my father became critically ill back at home. A summer stock contract at the Kennebunkport Playhouse came through just in time. – Crowley in a 1959 interview by Hedda Hopper


**END OF EXTRACT--------------------------


In our interview, Crowley said of her Kennebunkport days, “At night, I was their ingénue, and in the daytime I was scrubbing toilets!”


During this early 1950s era, the young actress (her name now abbreviated to just Kathleen Crowley) also did TV work in New York; she hit the small-screen jackpot when she was hired to play the title role in a Robert Montgomery Presents adaptation of “A Star Is Born.” She was interviewed and selected by Montgomery, who had been auditioning scores of experienced actresses for six months. On December 29, 1950, between the time that Montgomery selected her and the night when she did the live show, she made a trip to Hollywood, toured a major studio, did a screen test and received a contract offer. But she turned it down because she thought a starring chance in TV (“A Star Is Born”) was the right choice for her. She said in 1951, “I want good dramatic TV and Broadway acting experience before I play in motion pictures. That can come later.”


She came back to New York to do “A Star Is Born,” playing a character rather like her real-life self at that moment in time: a small-town girl-Hollywood unknown who is given a starring role and makes good. She told me,


**START OF EXTRACT----------------


It was live; shot with three cameras, out at NBC, Studio 8H, the same studio where Toscanini used to direct all of his symphonies. I was on the cover of Cue magazine and there was a spread on me in Life—it was a great beginning. These were the days of live television from New York; there was Kraft Television Theatre where I did “Jane Eyre” [February 28, 1951] with John Baragrey as Rochester, all very important things. So I never even went back to the Academy to get my diploma [laughs]! I started to work with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and somehow my work was being noticed by Hollywood—they have their scouts. I was offered movie contracts by Universal, Warners and Fox, and I just didn't want to go. My dream was to be a stage actress and I wanted to join the Abbey Players in Ireland. I talked with Lee Strasberg about it and he said it would be tough. I wrote to a couple of playwrights there and they gave me some very discouraging replies—“If you don’t know Gaelic, stay the hell out of our country!” …These Hollywood contracts kept coming to me, and my father had a stroke, and I decided that, instead of eating bouillon cubes and being so idealistic, I would go to Hollywood.


**END OF EXTRACT--------------------


Crowley landed at 20th Century-Fox and film-debuted in a supporting role as Dale Robertson’s girlfriend in The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953), a remake of the 1935 Fox film that made Henry Fonda a star. Also in the cast: Fox contractee Charlotte Austin, who only knew Crowley briefly but 65 years later vividly remembers her as: “Genteel. Lovely. Sensitive. Very bright. And she had beautiful speech, with a little bit of an Irish lilt, and sometimes spoke in almost a whisper.”


Crowley’s next Fox film, also starring Robertson, was the Western The Silver Whip, based on a novel by Jack Schaefer (Shane). It was a showcase for its male stars Robertson, Rory Calhoun and Robert Wagner, but fourth-billed Crowley popped up periodically as Wagner’s Irish girlfriend. Attention, foot fetishists: For almost 20 seconds before you first see her face, an appreciative camera focuses on her bare legs and wiggling toes.


According to an October 1952 Hedda Hopper column, Crowley’s father, still recovering from his stroke and unable to speak, read in the New York Daily News that Kathleen would next co-star with Robert Wagner in Beneath the 12-Mile Reef. This prompted him to turn to his wife and say, “Well, Mama, I believe our little stinker’s going to make it.” But Kathleen did not appear in 12-Mile Reef, or any other Fox films; she was drawing a salary there, but for months she wasn't given any work. “Then CinemaScope came in, and Fox let everyone go,” she told me. “One Friday afternoon, they started giving out pink slips – people who’d been there 18 and 20 years got them. …After about a year there, I got my walking papers.”


Kathleen walked very quickly right to her first freelance movie job: She got the Fox heave-ho one day and landed a part in the Korean War drama Sabre Jet the next. (Columnist Sheilah Graham wrote that in Sabre Jet, Crowley gave “a gem of a bit performance.”) In July 1953, Hedda Hopper revealed that Crowley had done more work in the last month than during her entire year at Fox: Sabre Jet, some TV episodes and a TV pilot film, Waterfront. The latter did go to series with Preston Foster as Cap’n John, skipper of the tugboat Cheryl Ann, Douglas Dick as his son Carl and Crowley appearing in multiple episodes as Carl’s girl Terry, daughter of a wealthy stockbroker (and Cap’n John can’t stand stockbrokers). The series advertised itself as “A distinctly New and Authentic 1st RUN Family-Situation Adventure Series … with a Salty Tang!”


Work was sparse throughout Hollywood in 1954, perhaps the reason Kathleen accepted a small, uncredited role as a sheriff’s wife in Ten Wanted Men and an even more measly part in Seven Cities of Gold. She cinched the female lead in the sagebrusher Wyoming Renegades, but food poisoning caused her to bow out (her replacement was Martha Hyer). Times weren’t good for Hollywood actors during this ’54 slowdown, but she shared her philosophy with an interviewer: “If you can make it today, you can make it any time. It would be easy to go back to New York and get a job, but that would be running away, and I don't want to run away.”


One night in late 1954 during the making of the murder mystery Female Jungle, a sleazy low-budget indie, Crowley went to the L.A. location where shooting was scheduled to take place, she found herself alone there – and she was assaulted by two or three (sources differ) men. Apparently she tried to keep her awful ordeal on the q.t., dropping out of sight (and/or perhaps spending time in a hospital) and letting the all-purpose excuse “illness” take the rap for her disappearing act. Such an unspecific excuse seems to have raised concern, and maybe a few eyebrows; from Erskine Johnson's January 8, 1955, “Man About Town” column: “Illness of Kathleen Crowley, the talented pretty of the Waterfront cast, has her rooters worried. She’s one of the best-liked young actresses in movietown.” A January 23 news blurb reported that at last she had rejoined the cast of Waterfront.


The strictly-for-kids Disney Western Westward Ho the Wagons (1956) wasn't a great movie and Kathleen as Fess Parker’s romantic interest didn’t have much of a part, but it changed her look for life: Natural brunette Crowley allowed Walt Disney to persuade her to shorten and redden her hair for the movie. Her agent was delighted with the way it photographed and Crowley cottoned to it as well, henceforth remaining a redhead. Numerous columnists, Hedda Hopper and Eve Starr among them, regularly expressed admiration for Crowley, the latter labeling her “perhaps the most versatile dramatic actress in all TV.” She did multiple episodes of many teleseries, among them Climax! (including Mary Roberts Rinehart’s “The Circular Staircase”) and Matinee Theatre. She told an audience at a 1996 FANEX convention that the script of one TV episode called for her to slap Edmond O’Brien and the actor carefully instructed her exactly where and how to hit him. But apparently she didn’t do it quite right, because his glass eye went flying.


She was also a good businesswoman and, according to a 1958 article by Hal Humphrey, read The Wall Street Journal instead of Variety and bought stocks instead of clothes. She told Humphrey that six years earlier, when Fox showed her the door, it taught her the value of financial security:


**START OF EXTRACT----------------------------



I believe the next job I got was in a Lone Ranger, and I took half of my earnings from that and bought my first stock. I’ve been buying stocks ever since. It’s kept me from having to do those stomach-rumble commercials on TV.


**END OF EXTRACT--------------------------


At this point, 1958, the actress who had gone hungry and walked places because she didn't have carfare in New York in 1950, owned one of Hollywood’s prettiest aeries, William “Hopalong Cassidy” Boyd’s split level hilltop home overlooking the Sunset Strip. Just the dividends from her stock were taking care of the mortgage payments. By now, her mother, widowed in 1955, was living with her. When actor Arthur Franz and director Paul Landres met there with her to go over the script of their upcoming sci-fi flick The Flame Barrier (1958), Franz walked around her deck giving the place the once-over and passed comments that made it clear he thought she was a kept woman, the owner of this property only because she was sleeping with some important man; she told me, “After that, I didn’t know how I was going to work with him.”


Warner Brothers became a second home to Crowley in the early ’60s as she regularly guest-starred on many of their top shows: Hawaiian Eye, Bronco, Maverick and especially 77 Sunset Strip (“She’s our good luck charm”—producer Howie Horwitz). There was near-tragedy in 1961 when she blinded herself in both eyes by mistaking a bottle of cleaning fluid for eyewash, and spent three days in a hospital recovering her sight. Robert Vaughn got carried away choking her in a 1961 episode of Thriller, leaving a red mark, so she took no chances a year later when she thought that another Vaughn, Vaughn Taylor, was doing the same thing to her in FBI Code 98: She sunk her teeth into his finger. The director kept rolling as the blood flowed.


A TV Guide profile said that Crowley’s work was her life, and Eve Starr wrote in March 1961,


**START OF EXTRACT------------------


Warners privately would like to boost Kathleen Crowley for an Emmy for her performance in a recent 77 Sunset Strip, but doesn't dare because Kathleen is not under contract and the studio’s contract players would scream to the high heavens. It might make it easier if some of the contract players would devote as much time and energy to their roles as Kathleen devotes to hers.


**END OF EXTRACT--------------------------


In 1969, wedding bells rang for Crowley and clothing manufacturer John Rubsam; the reception was held in the garden of a luxury Bel-Air hotel and they honeymooned in the Caribbean aboard his yacht. About a year later, baby made three—and it was son Matthew’s birth that brought her back east. “This [her old Green Bank stamping grounds] is where I wanted to raise my child,” she said in her 2000 Asbury Park Press interview. “I think it, somehow, may be tougher in the country, but I think you learn the true values here. …I was smart enough to come back and raise my son. I don't know how smart I was over the years, but I was smart to do that.”


Patti Groff of Egg Harbor knew Kathleen (or Betty, as Patti calls her) starting in the late ’40s when Pat was a little girl and Kathleen a teenager. She told me, “Betty brought Matthew home from California, she didn't want him in that environment. She didn't want him growing up like a lot of the kids do – drugs, they don't think their mother loves ’em or that their dad loves ’em, and they get shuffled to the side. Those things happen in that kind of an industry.” Around this time, Kathleen and her husband went their separate ways, and Kathleen’s mother died in 1972. That same year, her life took another unexpected turn: She took the job of raising and lowering the Route 563 bridge over the Mullica River, to accommodate boat traffic. She said in her Asbury Park Press interview, “The job was available. I surprised a lot of people by applying for it. They said, ‘From Miss New Jersey to a bridge tender?’ I said, ‘You bet.’ It’s just something I wanted to do.”


“When a boat came down the river, it would sound its horn,” Patti Groff told me. “The bridge was right behind her house. She’d hear the horn and come out her back door. Sometimes she’d ride a bicycle down to the bridge. She had to turn a crank to raise the drawbridge, wait for the boat to pass and then put the bridge down and come home. Saturdays, Sundays and holidays were very busy; sometimes it was SO busy that she’d just sit in the little guard shack out there. She enjoyed doing it. She felt needed. It was something that she could do, AND raise her son. And get a little bit of a pension from the state.”


I telephone-interviewed Crowley in the early 1990s and later got her to attend the cowboy-themed Memphis Film Festival and a horror-sci-fi FANEX convention in Maryland. Between the interview (published in Starlog magazine) and these well-received public appearances, she liked to joke that I was responsible for her “resurrection.” Her participation in the 1996 Memphis Film Festival was not advertised because she wanted to surprise one of the other celebrity guests, actor Michael Pate. When festival honcho Ray Nielsen did a Q&A with Pate, she wore sunglasses and sat a ways back in the audience; and at one point she raised her hand and in a disguised voice asked Pate how he liked working with Kathleen Crowley. The unsuspecting Pate enthusiastically sang the praises of his Curse of the Undead (1959) co-star, until at last Crowley announced who she was and came out of the applauding audience for a hugs-and-kisses reunion with the startled actor.


In June 1998, Crowley had open heart surgery, and a few days later suffered a severe stroke that left her partially paralyzed on her left side, unable to open her eyes, unable to speak. She soon recovered her sight and speech but needed a walker to get around. Across the street from her house was her son’s home and business, Matt’s Riverside Pizza, and she moved into a room on its ground floor. (The building was once her father’s gas station, general store and post office.) A 2002 visitor, FANEX mainstay Barry Murphy, found that the stroke had aged her, that she was confined to a wheelchair and had short-term memory issues; but on the bright side, she still had her wit, good humor and long-term memory. “We talked for quite a while and had a few laughs,” Murphy wrote me at the time. “She is such an interesting personality. We all love the lady. I feel so bad for what has happened to her but she seems to be taking it well.


“She asked me to say hello to ‘that sweetie Tom Weaver.’ Good grief, maybe she hasn't recovered as much as I thought.”


“That stroke took its toll on her,” says Patti Groff. “With his mom so sick, Matthew eventually closed the pizzeria, it was too much to handle. He took good care of her, and then hired caretakers one at a time. The pizzeria was turned into a house, several rooms downstairs, several rooms upstairs, and they all lived there, Matthew and her and a caretaker. Matthew got married and his wife Stacey moved in, and then they had a daughter, a little girl, the apple of Betty’s eye.” Toward the end of Kathleen’s life, there was yet one more resident in the house: Matthew’s father, i.e., Kathleen’s ex, with health problems of his own and in need of help from their son.


Crowley died in her home on April 23, 2017. As a friend wrote on Kathleen’s Life Tributes page on the funeral home’s website, “A light has gone out along the Mullica River.” Several days later, an Atlantic City paper reported that her son Matthew Rubsam


**START OF EXTRACT------------------


said that everyone [at her April 27 funeral] told him they admired his mother’s toughness after recovering from a major stroke in the late 1990s. The stroke limited some of what she could do, but it didn’t stop her from telling everyone what was on her mind, he said.


In her final years, Crowley spent a lot of time with her nine-year-old granddaughter, Samantha, playing games, singing songs and reading stories.


“I’ll just remember how strong she was. She overcame a lot of obstacles,” Rubsam said. “She was just a really neat person.”


**END OF EXTRACT--------------


Crowley is buried in the family plot, by the river, behind the church where she taught Sunday school.


Acknowledgements: Thanks to Kathleen Crowley, Patti Groff, Laura Wagner, Chelsea Mineur of the Miss America Organization, Charlotte Austin, Ray Nielsen, Barry Murphy, Harris Lentz, Boyd & Donna Magers, Donna Lucas, and Robert Rotter of the Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen website (see his ad in this issue)


 

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