The Revelation of Johnnie Ray
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Creative Non Fiction, Sexuality, LGBTQ, History, Music

There’s hints of him in a few places, like in the 1982 hit song “Come On Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners.

Poor old Johnnie Ray,

Sounded sad upon the radio;

He moved a million hearts in Mono.

Our mothers cried;

Sang along, who’d blame them.

He’s in Billy Joel’s 1989 song “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” A 1994 biography by Jonny Whiteside is out of print.

Academics discuss him sometimes. “Few details about Johnnie Ray conform to sexual scripts of the postwar era,” notes Vincent L. Stephens in Rocking the Closet. “Deaf, effeminate, bisexual, openly approving of black culture, and loathed by many music critics, he was seemingly an anomaly.”

I pull up newspaper archives, trying to follow the story as it’s happening. He wasn’t the first to sing “Cry.” He was the first man. It’s a woman’s song. The narrative is one woman is talking to another who’s been dumped by a boyfriend, now sits listening to the radio.

“So let your hair down and go right on and cry . . .”

In January 1952 a mystified reviewer tries to follow the fluctuations in gender. “His voice breaks tearfully over a phrase as if it couldn’t go on, but it rises manfully from the abyss of its own despair. Frequently it lingers longingly over a word with the secret regret of an old maid fingering a faded rose in her memory book.”

Then Johnnie Ray moves — the way men usually don’t. “His body rocks, his firsts are clenched desperately, and his tightly shut eyes frequently yield tears in the middle of a song.” He’s interviewed. “I really try not to cry,” he says. “I mean, after all, it doesn’t look very masculine on the floor of a nightclub or in a recording studio. But I get lost in a song, in a sad song, and I can’t help it. The tears just come.”

Why does he cry? “Maybe there’s a sadness in me, from when I was a boy,” he says. “I was half deaf and I still wear a hearing aid. As a kid I couldn’t hear the teachers very well. Other kids got tired of shouting. I was left by myself.”

His plans include saving money, and getting married. “I’ve never been in love,” he says. “I’d like to be. I’d like to be very much.”

“There is no in-between on Johnnie Ray’s almost weird singing style — you either like it intensely or you detest it,” a reviewer writes.

The latter is more evident in newspaper coverage. “There is an affliction upon us, momentarily, in the form of a singer called Johnnie Ray,” goes another update.

But his live shows became, briefly, unmissable. In her memoir, Rosemary Clooney recalls catching one at the Copa. “Frankie Laine was there, Tallullah Bankhead, the Dutchess of Windsor.” She notes Marlene Dietrich and Yul Brynner there, separately, though everyone knows they’re having an affair. Johnnie sang, Clooney writes, “and everyone waited for him to fall down on his knees and cry and do all the outlandish things that people had never seen done on the Copa stage before.”

Dietrich, I notice, is quoted in a Leonard Lyons showbiz column speaking of the show, saying she approves of the ‘exaggerated mannerisms’. “There’s too much underplaying in show business today,” she says.

He got good notices. “It was a masterful display of showmanship that evoked mass hysteria resembling a Holy Roller meeting,” Billboard reports.

The New York Times sent its classical music reviewer. “When he sings ‘Cry’, Johnnie Ray looks and sounds like a man possessed by an unassuageable grief,” he writes. The kids like it, but it’s all a passing fad, he thinks. “His pain may be their pain. His wailing and writhing may reflect their secret impulses. His performance is the anatomy of self-pity.”

I read that and think: they’re reading him as gay, and probably all know about the incident in the bathroom—Johnny’s run-in with a vice officer in Detroit the previous year.

He’d perform for decades, but it’s like he tried to turn into someone else. As Vincent L. Stephens puts it: “Ray attempted to downplay the very things that made him interesting. He went for middle of the road instead of propelling himself forward musically and culturally in the lane he had already carved out.”

The pivotal moment might be when Ray marries in May 1952. “Crying Crooner is Paralyzed at Wedding,” the headlines read. As the report reads: “Even in the small room, none could hear him say ‘I do’.”

He was born January 10, 1927 in Dallas, Oregon.

“That son of a gun could play the heck out of a piano,” a childhood friend says. I’m flipping through Whiteside’s biography. Ray grew up Christian during the Depression, with a real strong mother and almost totally silent father, emotionally destroyed after losing a family farm.

Little Johnny sings in church, loves country music, then black music. “We could hear him all over the neighborhood,” a childhood friend recalls. He left an impression for curious clothes and odd episodes, like dying his hair green. “Show business was his obsession, all the time,” his sister says.

He’d later describe performing in nearly religious terms, as a ‘calling’, saying: “I had to become what I had to become.”

Age 13, at a swimming hole, he was with a group of boys, throwing each other in the air using a pup tent. He was up ten feet in the air, and coming down, fell on the grass. A blade of grass jammed into his left ear, punctured his ear drum and he lost half his hearing. Disoriented, he walked home.

Unsure what his problem was, he drifted into a private world. When he got his first hearing aid, he sat raptly listening to rainfall, as his family cried.

Though it’s not clear, here as always, how reliable he is when telling stories of his past. The scholar Cheryl Herr, in a 2009 paper on Ray’s hearing disability, suspects the accident story was invented, and the hearing loss was congenital. As a boy, he’d have denied it as long as he could, “as though to accept the diagnosis of a severe hearing impairment were deeply embarrassing and painfully dishonoring to his family.”

His sister tells Whiteside: “Mama was very domineering, and if she could have called it, she would have kept him in her little world, tied by the apron strings.”

His father, suddenly, spoke up, saying Johnnie should go follow his dreams. “Go as far as you can go, and if when you get there you don’t have the money to get home, I’ll help you.”

Ray went to L.A. to become a movie actor, but got no interest. “I wasn’t handsome,” he’d say. “I knew I wasn’t going to be getting any leading man parts, so I did what I had to do to stay in the business, which was to sing and play the piano.” He’d credit one of the strippers with taking him under her wing. “She taught me stage presence and she and a couple of comics were always on hand to throw a drunk out if he tried to pick a fight.”

All along, he was working on his hazy sexuality. “There were women and there were men,” an L.A. friend tells Whiteside. “He was a little little kid with a big dick. He liked to talk about that and people liked to hear about it.” When he’s with women, it seems like they’re doing a lot of work.

By 1949, after a year or so in L.A., he was ready to go home. “Starved to death, literally—I remember stealing lemons for breakfast once,” he recalls. He called home and his dad sent him money for a return bus trip.

He came back and worked clubs in Oregon, worked on his songwriting, and on becoming an alcoholic—his lifelong romance.

There was God in there too. He had a cosmic moment lying on a riverbank at night on the Umpquah River, saying up to the heavens, “I guess I’m licked.” Staring a passing cloud, he ‘heard things’, he said, and that night wrote a song, “The Little White Cloud that Cried.” It would be the B-side to “Cry,” and set the narrative focus for his career, a descent into a realm of taboo: male grief and male feeling.

In club appearances he started getting wild, “very physical and demonstrative,” he’d say. “I had difficulty keeping jobs.” He worked across the country, getting a footing in Detroit, where clubs let him go crazy onstage. He recalls later “the piano bench would go flying across the stage, draperies would be coming down, the piano would get beaten, the music scattered everywhere. I was all over the place.”

A talent scout for Columbia Records thought Johnnie was a superstar. His bosses didn’t agree.

“They all thought I was pitching a girl who sounded like Dinah Washington!” Danny Kessler tells Whiteside. “Finally, I convinced them that she was a boy, and then I had to break the news that she was a white boy.”

Local police were even less impressed. Having spotted Ray as a “scrawny white queer with the gizmo stuck in his ear,” in Whiteside’s words, they grabbed him one night at a bar when he hit on a cop. Johnnie Ray’s pick-up lines are preserved in the incident report.

“Hi, hot isn’t it?” he says.

“Sure is,” the cop replies.

“I know where it’s cool,” Johnnie says. “Real cool.”

“Where might that be?” the cop asks.

“My place,” Johnnie replies.

They scuffled when the handcuffs came out. Hauled in, Ray turned off his hearing aid, pled guilty, and returned home.

He was friends with Tony Bennett, who’d credit him as “the father of rock and roll.”

In an interview with Whitehead, Bennett recalls that music at the time was “very sentimental, lovely, well-written songs, done very sweetly. But Johnnie became a visual performer. He was the first to charge an audience.” In part it was because Ray, when performing, couldn’t hear himself.

In his inner silence, he seemed to go into a hyperactive state. The piano bench was inevitably sent flying, the curtains torn, as Johnnie pioneered in taking the microphone on trips around the stage. “He broke tempo, rules, piano lids, music stands and hearts every time he performed,” Whiteside writes. “More and more, his audiences responded in kind.”

With little idea his record was released, he went to a promotional appearance to see hundreds of teenage girls waiting. They were for him.

He put out for them, getting “pretty carried away,” a friend recalls, “so he was rolling on the floor, crying and tearing his hair out, but that’s not the worst. He then stood up, took off one of his loafers, which had a metal cleat on it, and commenced banging out the rhythm on the top of this brand new, uninsured grand piano! And the audience was going crazy, absolutely crazy.”

The birth of rock owed to a demographic shift. The male population was depleted. After the carnage of World War 2, there was the Korean War. Girls were thirsty?—maybe for a man who wasn’t intent on planetary destruction.

“Cry” was written by Churchill Kohlman, a black man working as a night watchman at a Pittsburgh dry cleaning factory.

It would be perfect to capture his emotional fervor and, as Whiteside notes, “unorthodox blend of male power and female sensitivity . . .”

“There was an electricity to that recording session that nobody could put their finger on,” Ray would recall.

Johnnie Ray and Churchill Kohlman (1952)

Released in late October 1951, the song was a cultural phenomenon. He tried to present his fame as an open license to being emotional. “People are too crowded inside themselves these days. They’re afraid to show any love. And boy, what is the primary existence for existing? It’s beauty and love.”

But his theme was grieving. “Cry” was a song about male feelings—locked up in a dungeon, now pouring out.

It made him into a figure of fun. He was the ‘Cry Guy’, the ‘Prince of Wails’. “He is America’s Number One Public Weeper,” a headline read.

And then Johnnie had a girlfriend. Herman Hover, who owned the Earl Carroll Theater and hosted Ray shows, gives Whiteside a colorful interview. “Someone told me that Johnnie was homosexual,” he says, “but I didn’t place any weight in that because most of your top attractions are homosexuals. It was so prevalent that it didn’t matter.”

What mattered was business, and Marilyn Morrison, the girl pursuing Johnnie, was the daughter of a prominent club owner on the Sunset Strip. A clear effort, in his mind, to take control of Johnnie’s career.

But Johnnie liked a woman in charge?—as much as his dad did. Marilyn was adept at navigating the world of showbiz, arranging his business contacts, and staging photos. After they divorce in 1954, he’s becomes a sort of companion to gossip maven Dorothy Kilgallen.

Rosemary Clooney notes: “Johnnie might be gay, as people said, but clearly not all the time.”

His real romance might be with alcohol. His longtime road manager, Tad Mann, later writes a memoir, Beyond the Marquee. “With most of Johnnie’s love affairs there was a correlation of one’s ability to drink glass to glass.”

His thoughts on the Kilgallen thing? “Though she would find moments with him memorable she knew Johnnie would be unable to break away from his male relationships.”

An icon of gay history, if just for his music. In “(Here Am I) Heartbroken” he sings, “It’s bad enough that I lost her / I had to lose him too.”

And a 1959 song, “A Sinner Am I”—where it’s not clear if he’s singing to God or a lover who isn’t described.

Tell me am I a sinner?

Tell me am I wrong?

Something is wrong with the picture

This is not my fault

So am I a sinner?

Am I a sinner?

In 1959, I’d say, that’s as gay as it gets.

In 1984, interviewed at his home in Hollywood, he’s asked if he ever sings happy songs.

He did once, he says, but the audience didn’t like it. “What they wanted from me was guilt and rejection. I gotta be pretty broken-hearted for them to enjoy me.”

In St. Louis, later the same year, he’s “struggling most of the time,” a reviewer thinks. His voice “no longer has much range, and he could hardly present the material with much of the impact he once had.” Only “Cry” and “The Little White Cloud that Cried” seem to come across.

He’s aging badly. There’s a darkness. He does AIDS benefits. He never publicly addresses his sexuality. In 1988, he’s in Australia, being interviewed before a show. How does he manage to keep crying on cue?

“I think I can move myself to tears on stage because I am a sensitive person,” he says. “I had an isolated and lonely childhood. My tears were always genuine and not just part of the performance.”

He never enjoyed fame, he says. “It was a lonely life. It was difficult to meet people, especially girls. There were lots of them hanging around but I was far too gallant to take advantage.”

He looks ‘haunted’ a moment, the reporter thinks.

October 7, 1989. He plays the Grand Theater in Salem, Oregon. It’s the first time he’s ever performed near where he grew up. “I’m a little dodgy about that,” he tells a reporter in his hotel room. “These people have never seen Elmer’s kid work.”

Both his parents had died. He gives the newspaper a photo of him with them, a family, and talks about his career. “All of a sudden, Johnnie Ray came along, and that wasn’t fun at all. There was a lot of controversy.”

He says he’s writing a memoir. “Some of it is kind of painful, and some of it is kind of funny,” he says.

He dies months later of liver failure. The concert in Salem is the last item noted in his obituary. “It doesn’t get any better than this,” he’d told the audience.