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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A TRY AT HOLLYWOOD as CHABING COOPER and GIVING UP ON LIFE

Isabel Rosario Cooper went back to entertainment or tried to.  Life in Hollywood didn't renew her work or fame that she'd left behind in Manila.

"Chabing (the name she used as an actor) went from playing a nurse, a geisha, a Siamese harem wife, a Native American, a Chinese servant, a Chinese-American secretary, a hula dancer, another Chinese servant, a Filipina servant, a Carabean slave, and an "Oriental" belly dancer.  In lower budget Charlie Chan films she has full scenes, exchanges dialogue with the lead.  In others she is just another body providing color, being a type.  (Pages 128-129)

"In the decade following her arrangement with MacArthur, Isabel Cooper relentlessly remakes herself, Isabel Kennamer, housewife from Washington, D.C; Belle Cooper, ingénue; Isabel Cooper, actress, possibly Isabel Moreno, wife, Chabing Cooper, nightclub hula dancer; Chabing, actress.  She shaves at least a decade from her actual age, claims to be white, Malay, Scottish, Irish, Javanese.  She moves from being a mistress to getting married, then divorced, to married again (and again.)

Finding herself evicted from a familiar role, and unsatisfied with the one that follows, she invents a plethora of selves in order to survive --sometimes just barely and with bruises to show--in the manifold niches available to women like her.  Both distant from and yet intimately bound to the war raging across both oceans, these roles show a woman making do with scant material and doggedly crafting a life and livelihood through ingenuity and manipulation, or what perhaps has been dismissed as "feminine wiles."  (Excerpt page 110)

The last film she appeared in was shot in 1953 and released the following year and was a fake documentary about burlesque. She had no other roles.

How Isabel continued to live is unknown. However, when she died, she was probably fifty years old and it was an overdose of barbiturates and was likely suicide. Her once upon a time husband, Frank Kennamer, now remarried with children, and a lawyer, was called upon and provided her a burial plot but it is without a headstone in Holy Cross Cemetery, Los Angeles.

There may have been an investigation but the file is lost.

C 2023 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot All Rights Reserved including International and Internet Rights

 

ELIA KAZAN : THE DEATH OF HIS WIFE BARBARA LODEN

 

Excerpted from Google Books

Then one day she stood naked before me, took my hand, and put it on her left breast. "Do you feel it?" she asked.

I found a lump there.

It was January of 1978.  She died in September 1980, on the fifth.  Here is a record of what happened in those thirty three months.

As soon as she found the lump in her breast, she did what a well trained actress does, she researched it, read books, interviewed friends, particularly one friend, a woman who had come through it - "at least so far." She consulted physicians, weighed their advice, came to her own conclusions. The record is notable for her desperate wavering from one course to another. What I saw when it was over was that no one, no expert oncologist, no spiritualist, has the vaguest idea of what to do about cancer.  We live in the dark.

...she was looking for a way to deal with it that didn't call for an operation. Reading books of the subject and a magazine called East-West, she decided to become a vegetarian and undertake a macrobiotic diet.  She came upon the writings of Michio Kushi, a Japanese doctor who'd had some success treating cancerous patients with diet and acupuncture, she went to the Acupuncture Center of Massachusetts and adopted his wheat plant  juice diet, which she found distasteful, and the macrobiotic diet of kale, brown rice, no meat.  A consultation with Kushi drew this opinion that the problem was not in her breast but in her liver. He said her liver was "feeble." Ginger presses were to be applied to her liver area.

(Barbara had other consultations and resisted having the lump removed due to the fact that permission pre surgery was that the entire breast as well as muscle could be taken off as well. I believe this is still a standard permission. About two years before she died she did have the lump removed.  She continued to try what we would call Holistic or New Age remedies but as the disease progressed she did try radiation and then chemo - what she dreaded most.)

X-RAY SKULL

PDF FILE OF WIFE ELIZABETH EDWARD'S WILL HUSBAND POLITICIAN JOHN IS LEFT OUT

Elizabeth Edward's, ex-wife of John Edwards, has lost her brave battle with cancer, and her personal estate is worth over a million dollars... Eleven days before she died, she signed this will which does not mention her estranged husband, but leaves all her worth to her children, with her oldest daughter as executor.

John Edwards probably has wealth of his own and it is fitting that Elizabeth leave what she has to her three children. Some news reports suggested though that Elizabeth had prevented John from marrying his mistress, with whom he has a 2 year old, Rielle Hunter, but that's stupid. A deceased person cannot prevent living people from marrying or a divorced spouse from marrying.

A person who lives in the public eye, especially if they are running for high office, has no privacy and in modern times it is very difficult to hide an extracurricular love/sex lifestyle.

Elizabeth was publically shamed by her husband and his mistress (something I do not agree with), though we are not sure really what happened first that lead to the public disclosure.

Perhaps this whole news story is privacy invasion and is beyond John Edwards and Reille Hunter not having class.

Missy