Karolyn Grimes, Zuzu in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ Looks Back at Her Life

For most of each year, Karolyn Grimes leads the sort of quiet, family-centric life that one might expect any retired 84-year-old grandmother to lead — but come December, that all changes. Indeed, when The Hollywood Reporter connected with her by telephone last week, the Seattle resident was, for the 22nd time, being celebrated at a festival in Seneca Falls, New York, and she would soon be rushing off to Detroit, where she would be a guest of honor at a similar gathering. Christmas was coming, and like Santa Claus, she had many places to go and people to see before the 25th.

That’s because 78 years ago, at the age of six, Grimes spent two weeks on the set of Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life playing Zuzu Bailey, the daughter of Jimmy Stewart’s George and Donna Reed’s Mary — and in so doing, totally unbeknownst to her, attained immortality.

Even though Grimes appears in only six minutes of the Christmas classic, anyone who has seen it remembers her. She was the adorable tyke who, bedridden at home after catching a cold, proudly shows her father a flower that her teacher gave her, off of which he accidentally knocks a few petals and then stuffs them in his pocket. Later, those petals serve as a reminder to the man, who has been contemplating suicide after a lifetime of bad breaks, what, and who, he has to live for. And when — spoiler alert — he, with the help of an aspiring angel, ultimately returns to his family, it’s Zuzu who, healthy again, proclaims the line that jerks tears from even the most hardened of viewers: “Daddy! Teacher says, ‘Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.’”

More than three-quarters of a century after the release of It’s a Wonderful Life, everybody is familiar with the film. But nobody could have imagined that the little girl featured in it would go on to experience trials and tragedies that make George Bailey’s pale in comparison.

* * *

Karolyn Grimes was born in Hollywood on the 4th of July in 1940, the only child of a Safeway store manager and a homemaker. Her mother, fearing that her father might be drafted to serve in World War II, which would have left the family in dire financial straits, decided to prepare her for a career as a child actress, starting her in all sorts of lessons — piano, violin, dancing, singing, elocution and dialect — when she was just a toddler, and taking her to audition for the town’s primary agent for child performers, Lola Moore, when she was just four.

Grimes was taken on as a client and immediately began being sent out on casting calls. Among the earliest parts that she landed: the daughter of Fred MacMurray’s character in 1945’s Pardon My Past and of Bing Crosby’s character in 1946’s Blue Skies. Then, in early 1946, came an audition for the first film being made by a new independent production company, Liberty Films, which was backed by three distinguished filmmakers who had just returned from the war and desired greater creative independence than they’d had prior to it: William Wyler, George Stevens and Capra. It’s a Wonderful Life would star another veteran of the war, Stewart, who had distinguished himself in the service and risen to the rank of colonel, but wasn’t certain he wanted to act anymore. And it required a number of child actors to play his kids.

Grimes, who still speaks in a sweet girlish voice, recalls that in the waiting room ahead of the audition, the mother of another little girl who was being considered “accidentally” spilled coffee on her dress. Grimes was unflustered when she was called in to meet Capra, which may have impressed him, along with her ability to “turn it on” when asked to do so. “At that point in time I didn’t read,” she says, “so it was just emotions, facial expressions and things like that.” Several days later, Moore called Grimes’ mother and told her that Grimes had gotten the job.

Grimes and the other child actors cast to play the Bailey kids were told to report to RKO Studios in Culver City in July 1946, during the last two weeks of the film’s shoot. She — or more specifically, her parents — received $75 for each week, no small sum in those days. But what she was more impressed by was what was on the ground when she arrived. “I was born and raised in Hollywood, so I never saw any snow, and here was all this snow. It wasn’t real, but boy, it was real to me, and I thought it was wonderful.” She was also struck by the Bailey family’s huge Christmas tree, which put to shame the small one that her family kept on a table at home. And by the other young actors, who she chased around the sets.

Under the watchful eyes of a teacher who was tasked with looking after the kids’ welfare, Grimes went to work with some of the masters of Hollywood’s Golden Age. She remembers her interactions with Capra: “He’d get down on his knees and look at me eye-level and say, ‘This is what I want you to do.’” As for the leads: “Jimmy Stewart? I was around him, on him and with him throughout the whole time I was there. I really never even noticed Donna Reed. It was all about him. I just connected with him.”

After shooting her scenes, Grimes departed from the set and went back to her regular life. (“There might’ve been a missing ornament off the tree,” she admits.) She later attended the wrap party, which was a picnic in Malibu, at which she remembers spending time with one of the actors she had not met on the shoot, the legendary Lionel Barrymore, whose wheelchair impressed her. And later, with her mother, she attended the film’s Hollywood premiere, on Christmas Eve of 1946, during which she fell asleep.

When It’s a Wonderful Life went into general release in January 1947, it failed to recoup its budget and was written off as a flop. That was a terrible blow for Capra, and a fatal one for Liberty Films, which released just one other film before being sold to Paramount Pictures. But none of that made any difference to Grimes. In her mind, it was, and for decades would remain, just another movie, no more or less important than the 15 others in which she appeared, including, over the next few years, 1947’s The Bishop’s Wife with Cary Grant, 1950’s Rio Grande with John Wayne and 1952’s Hans Christian Andersen with Danny Kaye.

Then, when Grimes was 11, her home life took a sad turn. “My mother started getting sick,” she recalls. “Unfortunately, it was something that couldn’t be cured. It was what we would call early-onset Alzheimer’s today. Back then, they didn’t call it that. They just called it cerebral atrophy.” From that point on, her acting career was put on the back burner. Her father didn’t really approve of it in the first place, but it became a financial impossibility, she says: “He would have had to pay somebody to take me for an audition because you have to have a guardian, and he’d have to pay for somebody, if I got a part, to be on set with me. It was a bit much for him.”

When Grimes was 14, her mother, at just 44, passed away. And just a year later, before she could even process that loss, her father was killed in a car accident. At 15, she was orphaned. Her father had not left a will, so her future was left to the court. “I had parents of friends who were willing to take me,” she recounts. “I asked the judge, ‘Do I have any say at all in who I go to or where I live?’ And he said, ‘Your desires are like a drop in the bucket.’ I’ll never forget that.”

In the end, she was placed into the custody of her father’s brother and his wife. “They came, got me, and took me back to a little town in Missouri called Osceola,” she says. There, for the next three years, she was subjected to “extremely cruel” treatment from her sadistic aunt, who suffered from some form of mental illness. At 18, Grimes married a local boy. “I had to get away, and that was the only way I could see of getting out of there.”

Grimes was newly liberated, but had no desire to return to California. “In Hollywood,” she explains, “it was always dog eat dog. In the Midwest, they’re sweet, good people. That’s where I wanted to be.” She and her husband had two daughters before divorcing. (He was later killed in a hunting accident.) She remarried to a man who already had three children from a prior marriage, and together they had two more kids.

In the midst of raising this large family, Grimes enrolled at the University of Central Missouri and became a medical technologist, spending 25 years in that occupation. Through it all, her own children knew little about her past. “They knew I was in the movies, but that wasn’t important to them because it wasn’t important to me,” she reasons. “I think in fourth grade they might’ve taken a picture to school and said, ‘This is my mom, and she did this,’ but that was about it.”

* * *

In the 1970s, a clerical oversight resulted in It’s a Wonderful Life’s copyright lapsing and the film entering the public domain, which made it possible for television networks to broadcast it without having to pay licensing or royalty fees. Consequently, it was shown almost on a loop every Christmas, and quickly garnered legions of fans.

Grimes, who had never seen the film, only caught wind of its resurgence in 1980 when she was 40 and living in Kanasas: “Someone knocked on my door when I was 40 and said, ‘Were you in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ And they said, ‘Can I have an interview?’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ So I dug up all my memorabilia from the basement, and we had an interview. The next week, the same thing happened, and then it happened again. I thought, ‘Maybe I’d better sit down and watch this movie.’” Her review? “I was so impressed, and I was so excited about it,” she volunteers with a chuckle.

Then, in 1989, tragedy struck Grimes yet again. Her youngest son, a shy and sensitive boy, took his own life. He was only 18. “The part that’s really sad,” she remarks softly, “is the fact that I never had my children see [It’s a Wonderful Life, with its message that every life has great meaning and value].”

A year later, while still deep in mourning — “I don’t think you ever get over that” — she received and decided to accept an invitation from the Film Society of Lincoln Center to attend its Chaplin Award Gala, at which Jimmy Stewart would be honored. The two got to speak for the first time as adults, and they remained in touch for the remaining seven years of his life, during which they commisserated, among other things, about the heartbreak of losing a child. (Stewart lost a son in the Vietnam War.) Just a few years later, Grimes’ second husband, to whom she had been married for 25 years, died of cancer. “I think it brought it on, really,” she says of their son’s suicide. “Something about that did something to him.”

It was right around then, at perhaps the lowest emotional point of Grimes’ life, that It’s a Wonderful Life saved her. In 1993, she and the three others who had played the Bailey kids were contacted by Target and asked to travel the country together as part of a Christmas promotional campaign. She took the gig, and says of the time she spent with her fellow former child performers, “We became real brothers and sisters after that.”

It was also on that tour that Grimes first began to appreciate just how much the film meant to so many. “People came through the line for autographs, and they talked about considering taking their own lives, and how they watched the movie and it saved them,” she marvels. It was those interactions that made her decide to devote the rest of her life to sharing It’s a Wonderful Life with others, to “spread the message or keep it alive, whatever I could do.” She elaborates, “I just thought, ‘This is my path and this is what I’m supposed to do.’ And I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Sometimes fans from It’s a Wonderful Life effectively come to Grimes — much like letters addressed simply to “the President” somehow find their way to the White House, letters addressed to “Zuzu” somehow find their way to her mailbox. (“The post office knows me and where I live,” she says with a chuckle.) Other times, she goes to them. “When I’m on the road talking to people and working with them, I feel like I’m doing something good. And it heals you.”

* * *

Each December, Grimes comes to Seneca Falls, a picturesque hamlet in upstate New York, because it was supposedly the inspiration for Bedford Falls, the fictional town in which the Baileys reside in It’s a Wonderful Life, and since 1995 has annually hosted a four-day It’s A Wonderful Life Festival. Numerous other alums of the film have joined her there over the years, but she is now one of only three survivors, and only one of the other two also made it this year (Jimmy Hawkins, who plays Zuzu’s younger brother Tommy; the other, Carol Coomes, who played Zuzu’s older sister Janie, has Alzheimer’s).

On a happier note, Grimes was accompanied at the festival this year, for the first time, by one of her daughters, as well as a granddaughter, named Bailey. They got to see first-hand just how much the woman known to her grandchildren as “Grandma Zuzu,” and the film she made when she was just a little girl, means to complete strangers. “There has to be something that people get from it to keep it in their hearts and in their homes every year at Christmas,” Grimes speculates. “And it’s something that I want to be a part of and share with everybody I can.”