#johnnie ray

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Nat "King" Cole, Billy May, and Johnnie Ray rehearsing backstage, May 5, 1952.

Photo: PoPsie Randolph via Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images/Decware

[rockabully]

various canvases from dec 2025 (hw, and @tallhouses comm) procreate

[citizenscreen]

Celebrating Martha Raye’s 30th anniversary in show business at Danny's Hideaway club in New York in 1956: Rocky Graziano, Jayne Mansfield, Martha, Johnnie Ray.

[infinitemarilynmonroe]

Marilyn Monroe and Johnnie Ray on the set of There's No Business Like Show Business, 1954.

[reefermadness]

✴︎ Johnnie Ray newspaper clippings, articles, magazine pages, & photos.

[ssshhicago]

polly wants a cracker. edit for the new white guy i think is kinda cool. look him up! song: ooh aah oh! by johnnie ray

[sparklejamesysparkle]

Lucille Ball and her close friend (and I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show co-star) Vivian Vance arrive at Idlewild Airport in New York on November 15th, 1962. The fourth (unpublished) photo shows Lucy and Viv with their husbands, comedian and producer Gary Morton (right) and literary agent, editor and publisher John Dodds (left). Morton was Ball's second husband after divorcing Desi Arnaz, and the pair had been married for almost exactly one year when these photos were taken (Lucy and Gary married on November 19th, 1961). Dodds was Vivian's fourth husband, also married the year prior on January 16th, 1961. It's of interest to note that though John was gay, Viv didn't care and the pair remained happily married until her passing in 1979. The newspaper clipping from The Bristol Virginia-Tennessean covers singer Johnnie Ray's arrest alongside Gary Morton ten years earlier on July 1st, 1952 in Minneapolis, Minnesota for "disorderly conduct" following a drunken party at the Radisson Hotel during Ray and Morton's gig in Minneapolis at the Radio City Theater. Accounts differ about what exactly transpired leading to Johnnie and Gary's arrest, with some stating it was for "disorderly conduct" after the pair pinched roller skates and water pistols from the hotel's gift shop and proceeded to raucously skate through the lobby and restaurant squirting patrons with their stolen water pistols. A few Lucille Ball biographers, however, have suggested that Ray and Morton were also allegedly arrested for "indecent exposure" and that they were both nude when they rolled through the hotel, a detail omitted from newspaper reports of the era (and possibly covered up with hush money paid by Johnnie's tour manager). Ray, it should be noted, was bisexual, and he was arrested on both prior and later occasions for soliciting sexual relations from undercover cops in public restrooms. Lucy and Vivian's friendship was also the subject of rumors and speculation, with Vivian later recalling: "I began hearing that Lucille and I were too close", adding that her previous (and truly awful) husband actor Phil Ober once told her: "People are talking about you two. You ought to be careful about the hugging and kissing you do on the show." During the period Lucy and Viv starred together on The Lucy Show in the early 1960s, certain executives at CBS unkindly dubbed the sitcom "Two Dykes Sans Dicks" behind the scenes, referencing The Dick Van Dyke Show which was appearing on the network at the same time. Lucy and Vivian remained lifelong friends, with Lucy's daughter Lucie Arnaz stating: "Viv was, in many ways, like a sister to my mother. She could talk to Mom like nobody else, and I don’t think my mother could confide in many people the way she would with Viv." Lucie also credited Vivian, who never had children, as being like a second mother to her, with "Aunt Viv" advising her to go into theatre (where Arnaz eventually found great success in the plays They're Playing Our Song, My One and Only, Lost in Yonkers, The Witches of Eastwick, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels among many other stage credits). Despite the unfounded rumors about their closeness, Lucy and Viv worked together a few more times after Vance left The Lucy Show in 1965, with Ball's longtime secretary Wanda Clark saying: "Lucille considered Vivian to be the best script doctor in town. If something wasn't working, those two ladies would put their heads together and figure it out." Their final appearance together was in the CBS television special Lucy Calls the President two years before Vivian's passing from breast and brain cancer at the age of 70. Though Vance was unwell during production and suffering from Bell's palsy, Lucy's friend Michael Stern remembered that "even after 50 years of doing comedy, she still wanted the support of Vivian. She was very protective of Vivian. You couldn't shoot her head-on because her mouth drooped a little bit (due to her illness). But it was wonderful to see them together one last time."

[yestergaze]

Mitzi Gaynor and Johnnie Ray circa 1954. They both appeared in the movie There's No Business Like Show Business (1954) an American musical comedy-drama directed by Walter Lang. The cast included Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Donald O'Connor and Marilyn Monroe. The movie was 20th Century Fox's first musical to be filmed in CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color. Mitzi Gaynor appeared in about 18 musicals between 1950 and 1963. Her most notable film was South Pacific (1958). Johnnie Ray's role in There's No Business Like Show Business would be his only movie. In the 1980s when Ray was asked why he never had made another film, he replied, "I was never asked."