I'LL NEVER FALL IN LOVE AGAIN : JOHNNIE RAY

Johnnie Ray composed this song, as he had some others.  Said to be his last hit, the singing sensation almost always had a song on the charts in the 1950's. Had he and his music gone out of style because the era of rock and roll was coming in, with Elvis Presley?  Or had he dodged many a controversy because of his sexuality?  Or was it a combination of all these things, and his drinking?  

JOHNNIE RAY IS SHOCKED BY DOROTHY'S DEATH : HE MUST GO ON - THE ROAD, IN LIFE

Once Johnnie Ray and Bill Franklin were a couple and in a star-manager relationship, and Johnnie's health began to restore, the two of them went to live in Torremelios, Spain,  not yet a resort, and lived a simple and affordable life. Johnnie had wanted to quit the show business treadmill he was on.  At this point he was 38 years old and had given up drinking knowing the cirrhosis could kill him. Actually most people would have died as much as he drank.

"That he was still unable to sleep even after this average daily elbow bending and pill popping regimen is an ugly insight to the myriad tensions, pressures, anxieties and mental snares that assailed him.  Johnnie's life was an exercise in extremes, unimaginable emotional zeniths, the rise and plunge of glorious rapture and shattering torture.  His anguish, like his capacity for intoxicants, was beyond comprehension. (page 313).

"Like New York, Dorothy Kilgallen had also changed.  Johnnie was shocked when they met face to face.  Dorothy was obviously deteriorating - her face was puffy, her figure was shot.  She had gained quite a bit of weight and seemed weak; her bearing and gait were stilted, her speech was no longer the tuneful silvery voice of Broadway, but closer to labored, thick-tongued voice of the Bowery.  Dorothy's passion and principals ranj as high, true and clear as ever, but her mental clarity and standards of practice were also degenerating.  (Page 318) 

She had also taken up with a new lover, the one that author Mark Shaw thinks may have cooperated with the Mafia to murder Dorothy.

Johnnie was trying to make a return (ie. not called a comeback) changing his show song list.  When he restarted his return with a show at The Latin Quarter in 1965, Dorothy was back stage for every show. After this success, bookers will calling from all over, and Johnnie agreed to perform in Las Vegas at the Tropicana. He was now mod in his appearance, upgrading to the 1960's with tossled hair and the picture of health.

Dorothy and her husband were also experiencing financial problems like never before.  So she took a paid "press junket" to Vegas in order to see Johnnie perform there.  It was important to Johnnie that she be there to show her support.  At the same time she was, as an investigative journalist, independently investigating the President John F. Kennedy assassination.

Bill Franklin took her calls and said she was using a "Little Girl Lost" voice.  He thought drugs were taking over her life. (Page 423-324)  Still, she arrived dressed beautifully to hear him sing and show her support.

"Dorothy spent four days in Las Vegas.  Between her boundless passion and limited time, Bill felt even more uncomfortable that he had as part of a trio in New York. "We all saw a lot of each other, and there were times when Johnnie and she went out alone.  She would come out to the house one night, Johnnie would go to her hotel the next," he said.  "I kind of felt in the middle there... a lot in the middle.  That happened a lot with her anyway, but it seemed she was feeling like maybe Johnnie didn't love her like she thought he should."  (page 326)

After the success of The Tropicana, Bill still had to search out more bookings for Johnnie.  On the night that Dorothy died, Johnnie wanted to watch "To Tell The Truth," another television game show on which there were mystery guests. Dorothy was one of the mystery guests and the show had been taped previously.

"We had lunch on the Sunset strip," Jimmy Campbell recalled.  "And John picked up the newspaper, opened it up and there was the headline: 'Dorothy Kilgallen Dies In Her Sleep.'  Jesus Christ -- he almost fainted on the spot.

He said, 'Wait a minute now ... and started crying like a baby.  He cried for real. She was a good lady, man.  Good to him, good to me, good to all of us," Campbell's voice tapered to near silence with the recollection.  "We got back up to the house, we're both crying now, and John says, 'Give me a drink.' We got drunk.  They were close, man, really tight.  She was one of the best friends he had.

"After he got done crying about it, he got pissed off." Campbell said, "John didn't believe she died of natural causes.  He said, 'I ain't gonna tell you everything that I know about what Dorothy knows, but I don't believe she just laid down and went to sleep like that.' He didn't tell me the whole story though.  Never would.  I asked him that day and he just said, 'It's dangerous to know what Dorothy knows." (pages 332-333)

Dorothy's funeral in New York in 1965 took place at St. Vincent Ferrer, the same Roman Catholic church she had been married in. A couple thousand New Yorkers showed up. Johnnie watched the news coverage on television and cried.

"John went berserk when Dorothy died," Jim Low said. "That just tore him apart.  I''' never forget it.  He was always very high on her, thought the world of her." The loss was a brutal, devastating blow that smashed Johnnie's life apart." (page 347)

Missy here!  This is the only reference to Johnnie's reaction to his lover's death I could find and I'm glad to know that his feelings for her were genuine.

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JOHNNIE RAY in HOLLAND CONCERT 1958

22 March 1958 at Avro Studio, Hilversum, Holland.  He was a unique talent and this performance is terrific.  Imagine Dorothy sitting in the audience, so prim but ready to jump out of her skin. Ray's popularity continued to be strong in Britain, even as it dimmed in the United States.

  

Ray was an actor in one film, "There's No Business Like Show Business.  The cast included Marilyn Monroe.  Dorothy Kilgallen was friendly with Marilyn.

NEW STAR JOHNNIE RAY, BISEXUAL, MARRIED MARILYN MORRISON and A FANTASTIC MARION DAVIES PARTY WELCOMES THEM TO HOLLYWOOD

Notes and Excerpts (and my thoughts as I go)!

I was so surprised to learn what I did from reading this book, which I found missing pages and written on: someone who borrowed it before me must have objected to content. 

I learned that, while I'd heard of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley and knew their music, there had been a singer as popular for a decade, who is thought to be the bridge to rock and roll; Johnnie Ray!  It was then my ambition to understand this man and Dorothy Kilgallen as a couple. 

Dorothy and her husband, Richard Kollmar, remained married, not just because of their Catholicism, but for the sake of public reputation and career, for the sake of their children, despite the fact that he was a womanizer and her affair with Johnnie Ray was marriage threatening.

She was a career women with power, a social woman who mixed with people from various walks of life, a woman who had sexual desires as much as she needed companionship, but also a woman who had ambitions and took risks, some which might have ended in being murdered.

According to author Johnny Whiteside, in his book Cry - The Johnnie Ray Story, Ray was promiscuous, bisexual, alcoholic, and endangered his career picking up men while on the road. (This was happening well before Gay Pride, and decades later other stars endangered their careers by similar behavior.) His sexual life included a long affair with Dorothy when in New York.

Johnnie Ray, fourteen years younger than Dorothy - more importantly from a younger, more adventurous generation - had grown up in a loving and supportive family. From a young age, he nurtured his singing talent though an injury had caused him to partially loose his hearing. Considered by some to be a rube from the country because of his down-home heritage, this friendly, handsome man traveled the world giving concerts. He worked hard. 

"The demands of being Johnnie Ray grew ever more intense.  With Bernie's avid encouragements, he began and would maintain for the next decade an average booking schedule of forty-fifty weeks out of the year.  Being Johnnie Ray was akin to riding a carnival tilt - a- whirl for three hundred and fifty consecutive days  The momentous spin, sweeping revolutions, twists, dips, leaps and dives of motion, the blur of colored lights and distorted crowd noise, the blood-churning repetition were a course of action demanding both total relaxation and complete concentration to survive." (page 131)

Even when his fame waned in the U.S., he remained a favorite in Great Britain and Australia. He could "move his audience to tantrums." At a performance at the Copacabana, a sort of variety show, in New York City, on April 1952, the audience included his peers such as Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney, but also important media people like Dorothy Kilgallen and Walter Winchell. (Page 111)

"Then he sang "The Little White Cloud That Cried." Johnnie turned on, shifting instantaneously from bashful by to a man scouring the deepest truth from his lyric, one that represented his essential self's totality of emotional understanding. The audience was, as he counted on, completely unprepared. ... His performance, coming after such a mild opener, shocked the house. He flexed, vibrated, shivered.  Every broad, frantic gesture and dramatic pose emphasized the lyric with physical spontaneity that was electrifying. His voice exhilarated them. It filled the collective ear and struck sparks.  When he finished the crowd was "torn from its 'show me attitude' into wild enthusiasm.  When he rose from the piano and dashed onto the floor, pencil mike in hand, they gasped. (Page 112)

Johnnie soon was accepted by Cafe Society in New York, the blue-blood elite, and made the newspapers. He was also earning what would be millions today, traveling and doing shows in major cities and seaside resorts in America and Europe. He was mobbed by female fans, broke attendance records for concerts, and was given exclusive contracts. He was being managed and he was drinking. Drinking tended to bring out a child-like playful side, such as games with water-pistols. 

Dorothy had held back on approval in her columns but then she saw him perform. She had to confess that she had been wrong.

"Dorothy Kilgallen's Voice of Broadway column described Johnnie as "Endsville." (Page 114.) She would continue to give him mentions in a favorable way from that point on.)

However (surprise!) Johnnie had women after him  Mainly one. Her name was Marilyn Morrison and her father was in the entertainment business. Marilyn was determined to marry Johnnie. She knew he had sex with men and thought she could handle that or convert him. Their engagement was announced by a gossip columnist Louella Parsons. (Johnnie may have been advised he should marry - to hone a public heterosexual reputation. Was he actually in love with her? It's said that there was a sense of some acting, some staging, on both their parts. He may have been torn up about being true to himself. Marilyn managed to miss her period, and that is what, perhaps, actually made up his mind. She actually held a press conference to state that he had asked her to marry him several weeks earlier and in May of 1952 they did in fact marry!  (Later in the media it would be announced that she had miscarried. How much was true?) The relationship didn't last a year but they agreed not to file for divorce until 1954.  

Yet there was someone who wanted to see that unconventional relationship work and who wanted to introduce the couple to every celebrity in Hollywood, and that person, was none other than Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst's mistress of many years...

MARION DAVIES THROWS JOHNNIE RAY and NEW WIFE MARILYN AN OUTLANDISHLY SUMPTUOUS HOLLYWOOD PARTY

Marion Davies was close to Marilyn Morrison's father and thought of Marilyn as a honorary niece and so now that Marilyn was married to Johnnie Ray... After years as the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, who, with him, had thrown many a party at San Simeon (Heart's Castle) and her Santa Monica beach house, Marion was ready to throw a party on her own, for Hearst had died in recent months. Her intention was to introduce Johnnie and Marilyn to everyone important in Hollywood, to help his star soar even higher!  Rather than hold this Hollywood/West Coast party at a club, she decided to turn her house in Beverly Hills into a world-class party venue.

"The three-story pink Mediterranean mansion's exterior front wall was torn open and tented, the driveway re-routed and extended so that arriving guests drover their limousines directly into a huge front room where a battery of valets awaited.  In this reception area was a long bar, a scattering of tables and an ancient Roman sarcophagus, freighted down from San Simeon, scrubbed, re-lined and filled with magnums, jeroboams and Methuselahs of champagne.

From that auspicious entry, guests passed through a series of rooms done up as replicas of New York's top night spots, authentic in every detail -- the tableware was flown in from El Morocco, the Stork Club and 21.  These rooms opened onto a sweeping terrace with a one-hundred-foot-long three-tiered pool running through a formal garden. The affair spilled out onto the grounds, where a circus tent was erected near a fish pond.  Even the garden paths were decorated with synthetic grass.

Three orchestras, the Eddie Oliver, Freddy Karger and Harold Stern oganizations, played.  Parisian florists were hired to create centerpieces for the fifty tables; each consisted of seventy-two American Beauty roses.  Eight uniformed Beverly Hills Police provided security, there were a dozen parking attendants and sixty caterers serving fifty pounds of caviar, four hundred pounds of filet mignon, seventy-five turkeys, three hundred and fifty chickens, and fifteen hams The guest list was reported variously as being five hundred, seven hundred and fifty and one thousand celebrities strong, who polished off fifty cases of imported liquor.  (page 138)

Many guests who were used to being spoiled said it was the most fantastic, even over-the-top, party they had ever been to, and then there was their hostess...

"Davies entrance was a moment of high drama; She appeared at the top of a grand staircase, clad in a velvet and lace Don Loper creation, supplemented by over a half million dollars worth of jewels. ... " (page 139)

Johnnie Ray and wife Marilyn then greeted Debbie Reynolds, Joan Crawford, Charleton Heston, Gary Cooper, Lena Horne, Jack Benny, Merle Oberon, Clark Gable... (These were the luminaries of their era in Hollywood but also significantly older than Johnnie and Marilyn. Marion Davies remained connected. Johnnie had been a star for about a year at this time and proceeded to stun audiences at Ciro's and the Hollywood equivalent of the New York clubs.)

The marriage did not work:

"Johnnie and Marilyn's marriage had been a complex construction based on fame and power, desire and fear, put over in all earnestness through the era's typical Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil fashion. It's final stages were played under the same rules of conduct. (page 151)

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My Readers, as time blogging here at Mistress Manifesto goes on, I find that so many of the people I've chosen to write about, people who've had books written about them mostly, cross over in some way.  Marion Davies is one of the most known mistresses and I featured her in July 2013   Go into my archives to read about her! MARION "ROSEBUD" DAVIES : MISTRESS OF NEWSPAPER MAN AND HEARST CASTLE BUILDER WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST is the title of the main page for that month.

Missy

 

JOHNNIE RAY : DOROTHY KILGALLEN'S AFFAIR WITH THE GENERATION YOUNGER 1950's POP SINGER WHO BOBBYSOXERS THREW THEMSELVES UPON

Dorothy Killgallen was a personality.  She was normally polite and poised but also was known for her ability to have a good laugh. She wore beautiful clothing and was attended to by a personal hairdresser. She had a tremendous career as a journalist and author and was famous, popular, and social. She had a spacious decorated brownstone to live in and on the fifth floor a personal abode she used as an office, which also was furnished with a bed. She earned money, though how much more than Johnnie Ray is not known.  Why did his older married woman who coaxed her beauty appeal to the singer?

According to Mark Shaw:

Excerpt: "When Johnnie Ray, the rangy, handsome, humble son of a devoted mother and mill worker with the golden voice, appeared on What's My Line, Kilgallen was stumped, and not happy about it.  Regardless, backstage the two chatted for better than an hour."  (Page 57) 

(Johnnie appeared at Jill's fourteenth birthday July 16, 1957. Jill, Dorothy's daughter, and her friends were fans of Johnnie, so Dorothy called his agent and asked if he could send over some records for the party. Instead Johnnie himself showed up with an armful of records and entertained them for an hour. I note that by then, the toddler at the house, youngest son Kerry, was probably Johnnie's so I question why she would have to have arranged this with his agent.)

Dorothy asked Ray if he would go see the film An Affair To Remember with her.  

Ray asked Dorothy to a Count Basie concert.  Both Johnnie and Dorothy loved jazz.  After the concert, he took her back stage and introduced her to Count Basie.

In 1958, with Johnnie, Dorothy hosted "63rd Street" parties at his address, a 2000 square foot New York apartment. (Page 64)

Excerpt: "That Kilgallen paraded her romantic relationship with Ray out in the open air may have been risky for others in the entertainment industry but there is no evidence that she was condemned for this illicit affair in any newspaper or magazine article.  To the contrary, Kilgallen was given a pass as if she had the right to such companionship outside marriage." (Page 65)

(Friends reported that the couple were lusty and could be heard in the den where they cavorted at parties.)

Missy here:  I knew nothing of Johnnie Ray, who's fame and popularity was like that of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, in the 1950's. Coming up I'll be telling you about some surprises I learned by reading the book Cry, by Jonny Whitesides. Be sure to watch the videos I've posted.

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JOHNNIE RAY on WHAT'S MY LINE 1954

LADY BLUE : LEON RUSSELL

Just one of my favorites...

GORDON GETTY : THERE WILL BE MUSIC TRAILER

JOHN LENNON : SURPRISE SURPRISE (SWEET BIRD OF PARADOX) THE SONG HE WROTE FOR MAY PANG

MAY PANG thought Los Angeles was so dull and boring that people needed something to do so badly that they acted out. People included John who spent several months in Los Angeles recording an album of classic rock and roll standards, drank too much, and destroyed property and even hit her in alcoholic blackouts. At the same time, though Yoko called every day and knew where they were, she didn't understand Rock and Roll, and May did. It was her kind of music. During the time May and John spent living together, he got out of his angry radical mode and it out to be very productive and successful creative period for him.