RICHARD'S WOMANIZING MADE DOROTHY VULNERABLE TO JOHNNIE RAY

Notes and Excerpts:

By 1950 Dorothy Kilgallen and husband Richard Kollmar were settled in the good life, a life that many could only dream of.  They had rich friends to visit and enjoy. They took vacations to Latin America, the islands of Greece, Rome and Paris. They went to church on Sunday and then to exclusive clubs like The Stork, bringing along the children. Their two children were enrolled in private schools and had a governess.

As a couple they were broadcasting a show together on the radio,  Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick, which brought in enough money for them to live in a sixteen room Park Avenue apartment with a lavish interior. They threw great parties, especially for New Years Eve and their wedding anniversaries, that included dancing to orchestras and costume balls. They appeared to be a perfect couple, still had a good time, still had so much in common. 

And as a Catholic, Dorothy believed in forever marriage.

However:

'Richard's whoring was common knowledge among the cognoscenti in New York - as commonly known as Dorothy's fidelity.  He brought his women to some parties given by Charlotte Manson, who was now a successful radio actress. "He would call me to tell me about his newest," Charlotte Manson recalled. "He would all of a sudden appear at my apartment with them.  It was unforgivable." (page 198)

"Edgar Hatfield arranged the financial settlements for his old school chum when pregnancies resulted.  A famous stripteaser was one of the several women whom Richard inconvenienced.  Hatfield thundered, "The least you can do is take some kind of precautions!"

"I can't be bothered," Richard replied...' (page 199)

(Though Dorothy is thought to have never complained, at least one old friend got a desperate call from her.  The couple began to live separate lives.)

Dorothy's journalism career was such that millions read her Voice of Broadway column as syndicated through the Hearst organization. She was not always kind to those she didn't like so a sometimes critical voice was apparent in what she wrote, and sometimes stars were nice to her just to maintain a good word. 

'...In 1952, however, emerged, at the dawning of the corseted Eisenhower years, a twenty-five year old farm boy named Johnnie Ray. Johnnie had been singing professionally for seven years when his record, "Cry," flip side "The Little White Cloud That Cried," jumped onto the charts and sold two million copies for Columbia, making it the second biggest hit in the company's history.  With a hearing aid protruding from one ear, the deafness resulting from an accident at a Boy Scout jamboree back in Oregon, he looked like a pale, anguished El Greco saint. There was a Kol Nidre choke in his voice, and a demented, revivalist abandon in his performance.  He jumped, wept, thumped, whispered, knelt, and contorted in a way that no white performer had done before.' (page 221-222)

'It was Dorothy, in fact, who was astonished by her own response to the young singer as she witnessed his performance for the first time. (At the Copacabana, New York City.) (page 222)

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Just an end note that on page 148 it's noted that Richard co-produced a Broadway play with his then partner Alfred Bloomingdale.  At the time Alfred, who's Mistress Vicki Morgan was the Mistress of the month in March 2016. VICKI MORGAN :  MONEY MAD MISTRESS OF ALFRED BLOOMINGDALE :  WAS SHE REALLY SO "BAD" WHEN SHE STUCK BY HIM ON HIS DEATHBED? was only twenty-eight grandson of the founder of the famous Bloomingdale's department store. However, the work on the show was actually the doing of RIchard, as Alfred seems to have been a passive partner or investor. I also want to mention that Richard was not a career failure overall, that he worked in a speculative business.  It's just that his wife, Dorothy Kilgallen's career was so outstanding comparatively. 

DOMINICK DUNNE : AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN: FICTION "LOOSELY BASED" on the VICKI MORGAN STORY

MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

 

"Loosely" is the word when it comes to this book based on the murder of Vicki Morgan.  This book was published in 1990.  Vicki Morgan was killed in 1983.  Of course, those of you who know the fiction and non fiction of the late Dominick Dunne, who once had a highly interesting monthly article in Vanity Fair Magazine about crime in high society, know that his own daughter was murdered by her boyfriend and so he had a special kind of empathy for murdered women.  Dunne he was both in Los Angeles and New York, as well as here, there, and everywhere,  accepted as a member of the upper class.  Therefore, it's likely that some of the fictive characters in his books were based on real people he knew so that his readers were often guessing who he meant.  (In this book I think possibly Frank Sinatra,  Johnny Carson, and a Mafia boss.) So how very much he was in the know about the Alfred Bloomingdale/ Vicki Morgan relationship, is anyone's guess.

 

What I wish to focus on here is the Mistresshood of Vicki Morgan and how and why she has been vilified. In many ways, Vicki was the Classic Mistress, as is the character of Flo March in this book.  From a poor, even very poor background with a lack of education and manners that are in need of an upgrade, much younger, beautiful, and - here goes the stereotype - and sought out as a kind of sexual servant because the wife is many wonderful things but also an infrequent, cold, or bad, or no longer desired lover.  Therefore sexual frustration is the key motivation for the man who has everything but the sex he wants can easily "buy" the sex from a Mistress, making her into a high glass prostitute.  Stereotype also played out is, that in the end the virtuous upper class wife keeps her wealth, goes on to another such or better marriage, and manages to get away with murder vicariously, because she simply gets others to take the hint and do what she wants; the important power of her reputation and family laurels allows her to do this. The Mistress on the other hand, such a Bad Girl, as if she is only defined by what she will do, is punished by abandonment, being financially cut off by the legal wife who prevails, and ends up a drunk or a suicide or is murdered.

 

How infinitely more interesting if we were not believing in these stereotypes which are actually not helpful to our understanding of mistresses (or wives) in all their varieties.

 

In Dunne's book, although the Jewish businessman with the Wasp Wife from the very right side of the tracks, is initially motivated, at the sight of the sexy Flo, to chase her down and make her the deal of a lifetime, he is also charmed by her and comes to love her, as she does him.  Perhaps it is she who accepts him as he is, undressed, as his wife only accepts him suited up in the finest.

 

It could be argued that Flo loves him more or better than his wife.  He doesn't want to leave his wife or his marriage, appreciating how it has benefitted his business and social standing, and it is the wife who uses the knowledge that he has cheated to end a marriage and move on.  He wants them both.  In this book, husband dies of a heart attack, which is one of the few natural deaths in it, and that leads to the wife's revenge of cutting the mistress off, even though the amount of money that mistress was entitled to via legal documents made right prior to his death provide a measly one million dollars to be paid over five years and a nice house when the couple are worth many times that. 

 

Flo ends up bludgeoned to death (as was Vicki Morgan) by an intruder (Vicki by a roommate) who was hired to find the "incriminating" tapes that she was making with a ghost writer so that she could bail herself out of poverty by writing a memoir.  (Many a mistress has had to do just that!)

 

As a side note, I'm only aware of Betsy Bloomingdale, Afred's wife, because of her frequent appearances in Women's Wear Daily and other society pages.   It does seem that no matter what scandal was occurring in her life, like the wife in this book, she kept up her appearances, acting as if she was untroubled by the realities of her marriage, and soldiered on. 

 

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Mistressmanifesto.blogspot.com

VICKI MORGAN's THERAPY at THALIANS MENTAL CLINIC at CEDARS SINAI

EXCERPTED from  BEAUTIFUL BAD GIRL by GORDON BASICHIS

"Vicki was told it was the stigma and not the role itself that plagued her.  She was not ashamed of being in love with a married man, but ashamed of her image in a critical society.  Since she was a child and her father began sending her checks in the mail, Vicki had always associated money with love.  This, she was told, had fostered her greatest dilemma, especially when standard portrayals of love and romance conflicted greatly with her experience and interpretations.  Despite her hidden emotions and secret fantasies, she was haunted by  the reality that men had tried to but her,"

(page 237)


According to Basichis, Alfred visited Vicki at the mental hospital and it was perhaps one of their most intimate, non sexual, times.  She said she felt closer to him then she ever had.  When he had his final illness and was in the hospital for months, Vicki dressed herself as a nurse and was at his bedside tending to him so much that she was near a nervous breakdown from the effort.

FANTOMAS

VICKI MORGAN's MISTRESS MONEY : THAT WILL BE CASH PLEASE? A NEGOTIATION WITH ALFRED - HEAVILY LEVERAGED

QUOTES and NOTES about VICKI MORGAN
from BEAUTIFUL BAD GIRL by Gordon Basichis

(Page 21)

"It got so crazy that I used to call the stores and buy over the phone.  I bought refrigerators, gas ranges, sight unseen. I used to tell them to send me the most expensive one.  No one had ever told me that the most expensive is not always the best.  I figured... hell, it's more money, it has to be better quality.  I'm really naïve in many ways.  It's like yesterday I was seventeen and woke up to find I was thirty years old. ...  You want to know what I did for the last ten years?  That's it.  I went shopping with Alfred's money."

(page150)  On the time Vicki left Alfred and had taken refuge with Bernie Cornfeld:

Vicki didn't dare have a bank account for fear the collections people would hound her for payments on the overdue charge cards.  Her debts were overwhelming, to say nothing of the millions the Internal Revenue Service could sue her for in unpaid taxes, which made the thought to clinging to her few remaining possessions that much more absurd.

(page 150)  NOTES
Weeks passed before Vicki as much HINTED that she might be willing to sleep with him.  Anticipation, she knew, served to w3het the appetite and Bernie, with all his girls, would have to learn that Vicki came first.  (a whole month went by before she did!?) He was charmed by her conservative posture.  Unlike the other women he saw, she wasn't struggling. She had furs, clothes, jewelry... Alfred had repossessed the Mercedes Benz when she walked out on him...

(page 158) NOTES
Vicki went back to California where Bernie awaited at his house there, as she had promised.  Then she absconded with Bernies' Maserati, her jewelry, Penny - her housekeeper, several bags of clothes, and went on the run again.  She went back to Alfred Bloomingdale as she had in the past...

(page 159)  He (Alfred) was elated that she had called him.  He had missed her and didn't mind telling her so.

(Page 167)  She told him that she would return but she would no longer be mingling with hookers or taking part in S and M.

VICKI MORGAN on RICH MEN, THEIR WIVES, and MISTRESSES LIKE HER A VANISHING BREED

From BEAUTIFUL BAD GIRL by Gorden Basichis

Page 32  (Alfred has died and she has begun to work on her memoir with Basichis.)

Vicki thinks rich men marry women to perpetuate the family and that these wives have charities to keep them busy, while the men hang out with each other.  About the men

"A few of the braver souls will keep a mistress like Alfred did.  Only Alfred gave me the kind of money the rest don't even dream of.  I'm the last of the breed.  Alfred saw to it.  There's only four - five other women that I know of - even heard of - who get the kind of money that I got from Alfred.

Page 52  NOTES Alfred's seduction of Vicki into mistresshood.  She has already participated in S and M sex scenes with him and hookers.

He told her that she was special. 
"Any man can see it, but I'm the one to bring it out.  Vicki, do you know what a mistress is?

He "patiently" defined the role of a mistress.  He explained that she was like a second wife to a man and that she was always taken care of.  There was security and longevity, far often the relationship between a man and his mistress lasted longer than his marriage.  There was passion and caring, a home away from home.

Alfred told Vicki to forget her husband.  "You have nothing to worry about for the rest of your life."  He also promises that she does not have to do the S and M, if there is anything she doesn't like.

Page 60 
EXCERPT
"Vicki was quite adept at these transitions, having learned from years of avoiding embarrassing questions regarding the source of her apparent wealth.  She believed it was to her advantage that no one ever knew everything.  From Alfred she learned to avoid being pinpointed.  From her own experiences she thought too much explanation was senseless since she'd never be fully understood.  So to protect herself, Vicki kept many things secret and ommitt4ed portions of others so that what she did reveal was imparted through selected vignettes.

VICKI MORGAN : MONEY MAD MISTRESS OF ALFRED BLOOMINGDALE : WAS SHE REALLY SO "BAD" WHEN SHE STUCK BY HIM ON HIS DEATHBED?

 

VICKI LYNN MORGAN

August 9, 1952 - July 7, 1983

Murdered in Los Angeles

 

BEAUTIFUL BAD GIRL by Gordon Basichis

This book is the primary reference for this month's posts about VICKI MORGAN.

There should have been a companion book called Ugly Bad Guy about her keeper,

 ALFRED BLOOMINGDALE. 

 It would have only been fair. 

After all, what makes Vicki Morgan, more than most women, "bad?"

 

  

Like many Classic Mistresses, Vicki Morgan had a disadvantaged childhood, a lack of education tied into having become an unwed mother as a teenager after a years long relationship, and, it could be argued, had only beauty as an asset, so what hope did she have to escape her past, especially because she spoke with a lisp? She'd entered into a marriage with a much older man who wasn't interested in having her child around, a man who was sexually adventurous despite his marriage to her.  She bumped along, relying on a not-so-great mother to care for her son, not happy, not fulfilled, not focused or ambitious enough to give her all to modeling or acting, but too young to not believe that things would get better for her. If she was raised up in a world that called women who had sex and got pregnant as teenagers BAD, then she was no longer GOOD. 

 

Alfred Bloomingdale, whose fortune began with inherited money, but who made a fortune with, in particular, Diner's Club,  was a member of the department store family of the same name,  and socially a friend of President Ronald Reagan and some of his political cronies.  He saw Vicki, pursued her, and competed with her husband to get her. She was 18 and he was 53 when their relationship began in 1970.  He saw her in a restaurant, pressed a check for $8000 in her hand, which she cashed despite her husband's protests, started a telephone blitz, and broke her marriage.

 

Bloomingdale had wealth and used it, within a month of first setting eyes upon her, to make her a deal.  He was forthright that he wanted her as his Mistress, but perhaps he was more manipulative about the Sadio-Masochistic sex that he groomed this barely legal woman, who was sometimes bisexual, to participate in.

 

Alfred, according to this book, which was interestingly based on interviews and conversations with Vicki Morgan while she was still alive, quickly inducted her into his S and M sex with prostitutes, and that went on for years, a few times a week, in a house he rented for that purpose, separate of where he lived or the houses he rented for Vicki.  It was a feature of her Mistresshood, as was a considerable sum of money spent on clothing, rent, interior décor, travel,  jewelry, and much else.  But they did have a relationship, one in which they both said they loved each other. 

 

He called her obsessively and she was on call, waiting around for him a lot.  When she opted out of the sick sex, in a sense renegotiating their relationship, he continued to whip women without her there...  Maybe the truth came at the very end when he was desperately ill and in the hospital for months while his wife mostly attended to their social life.  Vicki, disguised as a nurse, snuck into the hospital day after day, and lovingly tended him, sponge bathing the man who had cancer and a whole lot else killing him.  She did this even though Betsy, Alfred Bloomingdale's wife, Betsy, a feature in Women's Wear Daily for her conservative fashion sense, and who made the rounds of High Society, had cut Vicki off a couple months before her husband died of cancer.

 

The relationship between Alfred and Vicki lasted about twelve years.

 

Vicki needed money and was in pursuit of a memoir before she was murdered by Marvin Pancoast, a mentally ill room mate that she took in after Bloomingdale died, because she had been left with no house to call her own, no car to call her own, no inheritance, nothing, and her funds were dwindling rapidly.  She had hired the famous inventor of the Palimony Concept, Marvin Mitchelson, to sue for FIVE MILLION, but Betsy fought, the sum was doubled to TEN MILLION, and then the case got thrown out of court.  Why?  Because Palimony was about people who actually lived together and the rest, the judge considered to be sexual services - near illegal.

 

Vicki had been taught to act and speak as a young wealthy woman, but she was just as happy to live in jeans as designer clothes.  She moved from a great address to an apartment in the San Fernando Valley taking her maid, and then again into a smaller place with a room mate, the man who would soon confess to her murder. 

 

Vicki Morgan didn't deserve to be murdered, when she was 30, ever, by anyone.  The murder, if it was really performed by room mate Pancoast, who confessed, but whose fingerprints were not found - and there were a lot of discrepancies - was not a murder of revenge or punishment because of her involvement with a rich, important, married man.  It's just that so many of Alfred's business associates and friends had known about his relationship with Vicki, even if his wife was maybe late in catching on, and then only because of forensic accounting, and these were powerful men, as were his political associations.  And most people associate violent sex with violent people, people who might go way over the line and actually kill, people who are psycho.  So maybe it's not easy to fully accept that Pancoast was the killer.  But, as in the case of Nicole Brown Simpson's murder, there was no other suspect.

 

Vicki had tried leaving the relationship, but she found herself being baited into another Mistress - Keeper relationship with another wealthy man, Bernie Cornfeld.

(You may have heard of his name before, as associated with Heidi Fleiss, the young woman who was once the Hollywood Madam to the stars.)  Incase you think that during her mistresshood Vicki was completely tied up with Alfred, think again.  She had two more marriages (three total), and several affairs including with the unmarried actor Cary Grant, and a year with the very married King Hassan II of Morocco.  She seems to have been an expert at playing two competing men against each other, and one of those men was always Alfred, who also usually won.

 

Leaving Alfred, who was addicted to her, proved to be more difficult than she thought, especially when she considered her son and his education, and the man pursued her again, full of promises, even as he became sickly. She just didn't have what it took to make the break.  Vicki over used valium, and illegal drugs, and she started drinking too.  She ended up in a mental clinic for several months, trying to stave off a mental breakdown.  And guess who came there to be with her and help her through, Alfred and another man who wanted to marry her.

 

Alfred died and she learned that his promises to take care of her for her life, even if he was no longer in it, were untrue. She was able to supply documentation, letters in which he directed one of his financial people, to take certain percentages and pay her with them. She told the author, she had taken care of others, but not herself.

 

Was it all about sex?  Was it all about greed?

 

Vicki Morgan, as a young woman, had moved to Hollywood, where she took a humble job at a tourist spot, the theatre called Grauman's Chinese, where stars had left handprints and shoe prints out front in the concrete. 

 

Meanwhile Betsy Bloomingdale, who grew up in wealthy Southern California, had a husband who was often busy elsewhere, and when her women friends, including the First Lady, warned her that they had witnessed Alfred with a Mistress, when she and their daughter even saw Alfred and Vicki together, openly shopping and smootching in Beverly Hills, she continued to act as if it were not true.  She wanted for nothing, and she soldiered on, her head held high, concerned about her personal reputation and upholding the Bloomingdales.

 

A bit of compare and contrast here:

 

ISADORA DUNCAN, a Mother of Modern Dance, who was the Mistress of Singer Sewing Machine heir Paris Singer, was our Mistress of the Month last month.  (Check out the posts for last month to learn more about her.)

Unlike Isadora Duncan, who it could be said was so uninterested or incompetent about money, who spent much of it on whims, pleasure, or gave it away or gifted others, because she was so not materialistic,  Vicki Morgan, sometimes called "Vicki Bloomingdale," had a reputation for loving money and spending whatever Alfred Bloomindale gave her, rapidly, but without championing a vocation or avocation, as Duncan did with her ambition to have a dancing school for disadvantaged children. 

Isadora Duncan decreed that marriage was a ridiculous proposal for any woman who read the contract.  When life had torn her to shreds and she was just barely continuing on, and as age and alcoholism claimed her, she married stupidly.  But though she experienced abandonment and heartbreak by the men who fathered her children and who she seems to have dedicated herself to, perhaps obsessively in her younger years, at some point, possibly as she increased her drinking, she started sleeping around.  She offered no apologies.  The word Prostitute wasn't hung on her.

Isadora, thought of sex as natural enough and over a life time she took many lovers, especially after the tragic death of her children and after her days of being a mistress of Paris Singer were over, but her promiscuity was a feminist refusal to accept the terms and conditions of being married and a protest against the double standard in which men got to sleep around but women didn't.  Isadora, when she finally witnessed prostitution and sex theatre in her travels of Argentina, was made deeply upset.  She associated sex with romance and love and feeling good and pleasure.

Vicki Morgan also had a few affairs, but also early abandonment, the marriage of someone who wanted to escape home, and clearly willingly indulged in sexuality not usually associated by most people with love, feeling good, and pleasure.  The word Prostitute was hung on her.  It is probably true that she was naturally bi-sexual.

Vicki, and some of her friends, seemed to be engaged in sex for, shall we say, purposes a lot closer to prostitution, when other men, Alfred and his friends, some of Ronald Reagan's Republican friends, were involved in orgies.

Between Black and White, in these matters there is a lot of Gray in defining who is a Mistress, and who is a Prostitute.  If a man has a woman on call for sex with him, and not much more, but he provides her a nice place to live and thousands of dollars, is that the ONLY reason he has her in his life?  Not for twelve years.  And if a man needs to whip women to find sexual fulfillment, it's my guess that man is unlikely to have a wife who "understands" him.  Then again, there's the stereotype that many men love, the Hooker with the Heart of Gold.

However difficult it is to understand Vicki Morgan for people outside her lifestyle, there are those who think Alfred Bloomingdale took a young woman just out of her teens, ruined her for other men, used her young life, and who owned her much more than she got.

This month I'll excerpt certain passages of this book that are about Defining Mistress.

PS.  The author unprofessionally had an affair with Vicki while they worked on her memoir.  He inserted himself in her life and inserted a lot of his opinion into this book.  If you're interested in reading about another high profile murdered Mistress, use the Google search feature embedded in the side bar to read about NICOLE BROWN SIMPSON, O.J. Simpson's mistress for years before he married her.  You may also want to search for the word PALIMONY to bring up more information and Mistresses!

C 2016  All Rights Reserved.  Internet and International Rights included.

Missy Rapport/ MistressManifesto.BlogSpot.com