page_title: Johnnie Ray
section_title: Relationships and sexuality
hierarchical_section_title: Johnnie Ray / Personal life / Relationships and sexuality
caption_attribution_description: English: Johnnie Ray and wife in 1954
context_page_description: John Alvin Ray was an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. Highly popular for most of the 1950s, Ray has been cited by critics as a major precursor to what became rock and roll, for his jazz and blues-influenced music, and his animated stage personality. Tony Bennett called Ray the "father of rock and roll," and historians have noted him as a pioneering figure in the development of the genre.
  Raised in Dallas, Oregon, Ray, who was partially deaf, began singing professionally at age fifteen on Portland radio stations. He gained a local following singing at small, predominantly African-American nightclubs in Detroit, where he was discovered in 1951 and subsequently signed to Okeh Records, a subsidiary of Columbia Records. He rose quickly from obscurity in the United States with the release of his debut album Johnnie Ray, as well as with a 78 rpm single, both of whose sides reached the Billboard magazine's Top Hot 100 chart, "Cry" and "The Little White Cloud That Cried".
  In 1954 Ray made his first and only major motion picture, There's No Business Like Show Business as part of an ensemble cast that included Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe.
context_section_description: In 1951, before Ray's fame, he was arrested in Detroit, Michigan for accosting and soliciting an undercover male vice-squad police officer for sex in the restroom of the Stone Theatre, a burlesque house. When he appeared in court, he pleaded guilty to the charges, paid a fine, and was released. Due to his obscurity at the time, Detroit newspapers did not report the story. After his rise to fame the following year, rumors about his sexuality began to spread as a result of the incident.
  Despite her knowledge of the solicitation arrest, Marilyn Morrison, daughter of the owner of the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles, married Ray at the peak of his American fame. The wedding ceremony took place in New York a short time after he gave his first New York concert, which was at the Copacabana. The New York Daily News made the wedding its cover story for May 26, 1952, and it reported that guests included Mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri.
  Aware of Ray's unorthodox sexuality, Morrison told a friend she would "straighten it out." The couple separated in 1953 and divorced in 1954. Several writers have noted that the Ray-Morrison marriage occurred under false pretenses, and that Ray had had a long-term relationship with his manager Bill Franklin. However, a biography of Ray points out that Franklin was 13 years younger than Ray, and that both their personal and business relationships began in 1963, many years after the Ray-Morrison divorce. In a 1953 newspaper interview with James Bacon, Ray blamed rumors about his sexuality for the breakup of his marriage to Morrison.
  In 1959, Ray was arrested again in Detroit for soliciting an undercover officer at the Brass Rail, a bar that was described many years later by one biographer as a haven for musicians, and by another biographer as a gay bar. Ray went to trial following this second arrest and was found not guilty. Two years after his death, several friends shared with biographer Jonny Whiteside their knowledge that Ray was bisexual.
  According to Ray's two biographers, Jonny Whiteside and Tad Mann, he did not have a close relationship with a man or a woman during the 13 years he lived after Bill Franklin stopped interacting with him and phoning him. Ray did maintain a loyal friendship with his road manager Tad Mann, who was married and raising five children. When Ray gave parties at his Los Angeles house in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, frequent guests included Mann, whose real name was Harold Gaze Mann III, and actress Jane Withers.
  According to lawyer and researcher Mark Shaw, Ray’s relationship with Dorothy Kilgallen produced her youngest child Kerry Kollmar, whom her husband Richard Kollmar disowned after Kilgallen's death in 1965. In two books that Shaw has authored, he claims that Kilgallen remained faithful to her husband for 13 years, ignoring rumors of his extramarital affairs because she did not witness evidence of any of them during that timeframe. With the passing of 13 years of married life, Richard Kollmar became careless to the extent that he brought a male lover into the third-floor master bedroom of his and Dorothy’s new home, a five-story brownstone on Manhattan’s East 68th Street. After Kilgallen caught the two men in a compromising position, she and Kollmar decided to stay married strictly for business, which included a talk radio show they broadcast from home every day that brought them large salaries and that promoted Broadway shows that Kollmar produced. Their radio listeners knew only that in 1953, a few months after they moved into the brownstone, she started talking about her pregnancy. 
  In 1954, Kilgallen’s baby boy was photographed for magazines and newspapers with her holding him, never with a father. Decades later, Johnnie Ray often mentioned Kilgallen to his manager Alan Eichler, and clearly remained devastated by her 1965 death, but he never said anything to Eichler about either of her two sons or her daughter.
  Mark Shaw, who interviewed Alan Eichler and had access to many other sources, shared some of this information during a presentation on YouTube
caption: Ray and wife Marilyn Morrison Ray in a photo dated 1954
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