Johnnie Ray - Personal Life

Personal Life

Ray was arrested twice for soliciting men for sex. He quietly pleaded guilty and paid a fine after the first arrest, in the restroom of the Stone Theatre burlesque house in Detroit, which was just prior to the release of his first record in 1951. The incident wasn't reported in newspapers, and very few people outside Detroit knew about it during his sudden rise to stardom in 1952. Ray went to trial following the second arrest in 1959, also in Detroit, for soliciting an undercover officer in a bar called the Brass Rail, which has been described variously as attracting traveling musicians and attracting gay people. He was found not guilty.

Despite her knowledge of the 1951 arrest, Marilyn Morrison, daughter of the owner of the Mocambo nightclub in West Hollywood, California, married Johnnie Ray in 1952. The wedding ceremony took place in New York a short time after he gave his first New York concert, which was at the Copacabana. New York mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri attended the ceremony, which got a lot of attention via the cover of the New York Daily News. Morrison was aware of the singer's sexuality from the start, telling a friend she would "straighten it out." The couple separated in 1953 and divorced in 1954. A Ray biography published in 1994 claimed Morrison tried to contact Ray many times in the decades that followed their divorce, sometimes talking on the phone with Bill Franklin, who served as his manager between 1963 and 1976. Ray always instructed Franklin to get rid of her on the phone. The book also claims Morrison seemed very sad while attending a Los Angeles memorial service for Ray a month after his death (he was buried in Oregon), and she refused to talk to the biographer in the early 1990s.

Several writers have noted that the Ray-Morrison marriage occurred under false pretenses, and that Ray had a long-term relationship with his manager, Bill Franklin. Ray also had a relationship with newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, whom he allegedly met for the first time during one of his two appearances as the mystery guest on What's My Line?. Ray told this story to Kilgallen biographer Lee Israel in 1976, at which time neither had access to the kinescopes of those live telecasts that date from August 22, 1954 and June 9, 1957. Kilgallen was a strong support for Ray during the solicitation trial in Detroit in December 1959, possibly communicating by telephone with the district attorney or judge. Ray's fate was decided by a jury composed entirely of older women, one of whom ran to Ray to console him when he fainted upon hearing the "not guilty" verdict.