Every horror fan knows the moment in Friday the 13th when the lights go out at Camp Crystal Lake and a lanky counselor named Bill heads off to check the generator. He never comes back. The young man playing Bill was Harry Crosby, the eldest child of Bing Crosby and his second wife, Kathryn, and in May 1980 he was a 21-year-old drama student making his first feature film.
Bing Crosby’s son Harry turned 68 on August 8, and this week Hello! magazine looked back at the career he gave up after that slasher hit. His path out of Hollywood took him somewhere far from Crystal Lake, but the story really begins on his father’s Christmas specials, when Harry was still in short pants.
How Did Harry Crosby End Up Singing On His Father’s Christmas Specials?
Harry Lillis Crosby III was born on August 8, 1958, in Los Angeles, less than a year after Bing married the actress Kathryn Grant in Las Vegas. She was 23 and he was 54. Sister Mary Frances followed in 1959 and brother Nathaniel in 1961, which gave Bing a second family two decades after his four sons with Dixie Lee.
Harry’s show business debut happened almost by accident. “I went down to watch him do the Hollywood Palace at age six, and they asked me if I knew any songs,” he recalled for PBS’s American Masters documentary Bing Crosby Rediscovered. “I said, well, I just learned a Christmas carol.” He ended up on the show that night in black tie and shorts, and he called it “the beginning of the Christmas shows.” Bing’s holiday editions of The Hollywood Palace with Kathryn and the three children became a December ritual for families at home.
The last special was Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas, taped at Elstree Studios outside London in September 1977, with Harry, Mary and Nathaniel as presenters and David Bowie dropping by to sing “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy” with Bing. A month later, on October 14, 1977, Bing died of a heart attack in Spain after a round of golf. He was 74, and the special aired on CBS that November 30 without him there to see it. Harry was 19 and already training to be an actor.
What Happened To Harry Crosby On The Set Of ‘Friday The 13th’?
Harry trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art from 1977 to 1980. In the fall of 1979 he went to rural New Jersey to shoot a low-budget horror movie from director Sean S. Cunningham, alongside Adrienne King, Betsy Palmer and a young Kevin Bacon.
He auditioned for Cunningham and the two clicked right away, he told author David Grove for the book Making Friday the 13th, where he said he “came to respect Sean as a director.” What sold him on the part was simple. “I also liked the fact that I was going to be in the film a long time and that I was going to be able to play the guitar.”
Bill’s death happens off camera, but filming the aftermath hurt. Makeup artist Tom Savini later admitted on Netflix’s The Movies That Made Us that his homemade fake blood seeped under a latex eye piece and “surface-burned poor Harry,” as Mental Floss reported. Crosby was briefly blinded and needed hospital treatment before he recovered. Savini’s verdict was blunt: “Not a proud moment.”
The movie cost roughly $550,000 and earned close to $60 million worldwide. For most young actors that would have been the start of something big, but Harry’s acting career was nearly over.
Why Did Bing Crosby’s Son Walk Away From Acting?
He did keep working for a few years. He played a Confederate soldier in the 1981 TV movie The Private History of a Campaign That Failed and turned up in a 1984 episode of the sitcom Double Trouble. Meanwhile his sister was having the bigger moment on screen. Mary Crosby played Kristin Shepard on Dallas, and in November 1980 viewers learned that Sue Ellen’s scheming sister was the one who shot J.R.
Harry chose a quieter road. He went back to school and earned an MBA from Fordham University. By 1987 he had started over in a field that had nothing to do with cameras, a switch Hello! called his “shocking new life,” and he has stayed out of show business ever since. Golf champion Nathaniel and the rest of the family turn up in our look at Bing Crosby’s children who carry on his legacy.
What Does Harry Crosby Do Now?
The boy who sang carols on The Hollywood Palace became a Wall Street dealmaker. Harry started as an associate at Lehman Brothers in 1987 and rose to director. From 2000 to 2005 he ran the financial sponsors group at Merrill Lynch, where his firm’s biography says he advised on more than $100 billion in transactions for private equity clients. He then became a partner at the private equity firms Snow Phipps and Cranemere. Since 2019 he has been a partner in business development at Trilantic North America in New York, where his job is finding companies for the firm to invest in.
He married Dr. Mihaela Skobe in 2003, and they have two children, Nicholas and Thea. His mother, Kathryn, died at her home in Hillsborough, California, on September 20, 2024, at age 90. Harry has also helped promote his father’s recordings. “We wanted to share a part of dad during Christmas,” he told Fox News in 2023 about a family holiday album.
At his own house, the music never left. “My son, Nicholas, and daughter, Thea, sing and play ‘White Christmas’ on the piano for everyone,” he told the Daily Express in 2019, calling it “a mainstay of Christmas Day.” He admitted it took him a while to get there. “It’s funny, I used to cringe at the idea of playing my father’s music,” he said, “but not now.”
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