TIL MORNING

Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight,

you'll live through the night.

--Dorothy Parker

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times:

It is a beautiful catastrophe.

--Le Corbusier

Authors’ Note

 

He was one of the world’s biggest singing stars. She was the most renowned female journalist of her time. Johnnie Ray and Dorothy Kilgallen. They had fame, power, money, connections. The last thing they needed was love.

In 1952, an American singer named Johnnie Ray dominated the charts with “Cry” and “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” Deaf in one ear, he produced heart-wrenching vocals that influenced celebrated entertainers including Elvis, The Beatles, and James Brown. But Johnnie Ray was an enigma. Some said he sounded black, some said he sounded like a woman. Was he gay? Bisexual? Most shook their heads and just listened in wonder.

“Just Walkin in the Rain” shot to No. 1 in 1956, right around the time he met journalist and “What’s My Line?” game show panelist, Dorothy Kilgallen.

Eleven years Johnnie’s senior and married, Dorothy co-hosted a long-running radio talk show with her husband from their brownstone on East 68th Street. She had risen to prominence after covering the Lindbergh kidnapping for Hearst’s New York Evening Journal when she was nineteen. Her coverage of the Dr. Sam Sheppard murder case, on which the television series “The Fugitive” was based, helped secure a new trial for Sheppard. With her “Voice of Broadway” gossip column, she rose even higher.

Dorothy and Johnnie’s very public love affair—the alcohol, the pillskies, the gossip, and the often delirious, sometimes cruel times—almost destroyed both of them. Yet they seemed to provide each other with an intoxicating rush neither could find with anyone else.

Johnnie was arrested twice for soliciting men for sex, and although he was found not guilty in 1959, the publicity surrounding his trial damaged his career.  Dorothy’s drinking threatened both her radio and television shows. Convinced that the government had hidden the truth about the Kennedy assassination, she believed her exclusive interview with Jack Ruby would reestablish her as a serious journalist. She published his testimony to the Warren Commission in the New York Journal American before the report was released to President Lyndon Johnson.

Almost all who knew about the two thought their union dangerous and confusing. “Johnnie Ray and Dorothy Kilgallen?” they’d say. “I can’t imagine them together.”

Was her bond with Johnnie as relatively uncomplicated as sex? Was it just a shared appetite for excess? The lure of great fame?  Was it love?

            Here’s a taste of each of them. Please watch – and read – decide for yourself.

Johnnie Ray sings “The Little White Cloud That Cried.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myu_wBPfpxs

Johnnie Ray sings “Cry,” 1957.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6p5lPpub3s

Johnnie Ray, live in Holland, 1958. “Just Walkin in the Rain”