Notes and Excerpts (and my thoughts as I go)!
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 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.)
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)
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)
C 2023 Mistress Manifesto - BlogSpot All Rights Reserved including International and Internet Rights
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
