Johnnie Ray and Miss Kilgallen Author:Bonnie Hearn HIll, Larry Hill He was the world's biggest singing star. She was the most renowned female journalist of her time. They had fame, power, money, connections. The last thing they needed was love. — Based on the real-life love affair between the 1950's singer Johnnie Ray and columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, Johnnie Ray and Miss Kilgallen is a love story that travels at ... more »the dangerous, roaring speed of a derailed roller coaster. The sexually conflicted Ray, who drives fans to a frenzy with songs like Cry and Please Mr. Sun, is a wild man out of control. Kilgallen, fifteen years his senior, is the picture of decorum as a Broadway columnist and panelist on the TV show What's My Line. Against all odds, they fall in love.
Their blatant display of excess shocks the most hardened partygoers from New York's Stork Club to Hollywood's Ciro's. They travel among the elite, the stars, and the wild characters between - Johnnie's irascible manager, Morrie, big-hearted blues singer, Miss Cornshucks, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Duke Ellington, Lennie Bruce, John F. Kennedy.
Seeking salvation in each other's arms, Dorothy and Johnnie fall to darkness in a nightmare time of assassination conspiracies and bizarre suicides and government enemy lists. They fight to protect their lives and careers using anything at hand: sex, betrayal, money, drugs, drink and more drink.
Close to death from their excesses, his life threatened by Dorothy's husband, Johnnie begins to back off their relationship. A panic-stricken Dorothy tries to recover her once-sterling career by gaining an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby and challenging the Warren Report, but is it too late? Johnnie struggles to survive, but has he fallen too low? These questions are answered with fiction that goes beyond biography and perhaps enters a territory nearer the truth.« less