Bill Ray shot some of the most iconic celebrity images of the 20th Century

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of famed LIFE magazine photographer Bill Ray.

Via the NY Post
By Isabel Vincent

January 18, 2020

Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at 

Madison Square Garden in May 1962

When Private Elvis Presley shipped out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard on his way to his military tour of duty in West Germany in September 1958, the US Army’s brass band played “Hound Dog” to honor the King of Rock and Roll.

“And the captains and the majors helped him with his bags!” said Bill Ray, the former LIFE Magazine photographer who captured the moment.

Ray, who died earlier this month at his home on the Upper West Side, shot some of the most iconic celebrity images of the 20th century.

There is his photograph of a sultry Marilyn Monroe in a shimmering, nude-colored dress, its plunging bare back accentuating her curves as she sang a breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in May 1962. Three months after Ray shot the picture on stage from behind the movie star, the troubled sex symbol would be dead of an overdose. Kennedy was assassinated a year after that, and the famous dress, designed by Hollywood costume designer Jean Louis, sold at auction a few years ago for nearly $5 million.

Ray, who worked for LIFE in Los Angeles, Paris and Beverly Hills, shot The Beatles when they first arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, partied with Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate a year before the pregnant actress was brutally murdered by Charles Manson in 1969. He was a regular presence on hundreds of Hollywood movie sets, photographing Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot and Natalie Wood, among others.

“Steve McQueen once told me that he had to have sex five times a day,” said Ray about the “Bullitt” star at a 2009 presentation of his greatest work at the Coffee House Club in midtown, where he had been a member for more than 50 years. “I was too stunned to ask Steve what happens if you don’t.”

William Ray was born in Shelby, Nebraska, a windswept village of 626 about two hours west of Omaha. Ray was the youngest of four children of a prosperous lumber merchant and his artist wife. He developed such a passion for photography that by the time he was 11, he was already a member of the Omaha Camera Club and had his own professional darkroom at home. He got his first staff job as a 17-year-old at the Lincoln Star Journal newspaper.

“The city editor had a smoke and hired me on the spot,” he said.

After a photographic workshop in Hannibal, Missouri, where he impressed the faculty with a series of photographs about the local barbershop, Ray was hired by LIFE magazine and sent to New York in 1957.

“I wanted to live in New York City since I saw Fred [Astaire] dance with Ginger [Rogers] in Central Park,” he said.

For years, Ray and Marlys Ray, his wife of nearly 62 years, lived in a sprawling apartment across from Central Park where he was a regular on the tennis courts and an avid bird watcher. On January 8, the couple took a long walk in the park, feeding a few cardinals along the way, “and, best of all, saw the rising nearly full moon with a kiss (one of our silly rituals),” said Marlys Ray, a partner in her husband’s photo business.

“It was his best day in a long time.”

Ray died hours later of a heart attack. He was 83.

August 11, 1965: Watts

Caption from LIFE "Children in Watts grow up with the signs of fear, desperation and hatred all around. The words painted last August on this little grocery store, telling rioters that it is owned by a Negro and urging them to burn something else, were left on the walls for months afterwards -- just in case." Photography by Bill Ray.

The Watts Riot, which raged for six days and resulted in more than forty million dollars worth of property damage, was both the largest and costliest urban rebellion of the Civil Rights era. The riot spurred from an incident on August 11, 1965 when Marquette Frye, a young African American motorist, was pulled over and arrested by Lee W. Minikus, a white California Highway Patrolman, for suspicion of driving while intoxicated. As a crowd on onlookers gathered at the scene of Frye's arrest, strained tensions between police officers and the crowd erupted in a violent exchange. The outbreak of violence that followed Frye's arrest immediately touched off a large-scale riot centered in the commercial section of Watts, a deeply impoverished African American neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. For several days, rioters overturned and burned automobiles and looted and damaged grocery stores, liquor stores, department stores, and pawnshops. Over the course of the six-day riot, over 14,000 California National Guard troops were mobilized in South Los Angeles and a curfew zone encompassing over forty-five miles was established in an attempt to restore public order. All told, the rioting claimed the lives of thirty-four people, resulted in more than one thousand reported injuries, and almost four thousand arrests before order was restored on August 17.

Throughout the crisis, public officials advanced the argument that the riot was the work outside agitators; however, an official investigation, prompted by Governor Pat Brown, found that the riot was a result of the Watts community's longstanding grievances and growing discontentment with high unemployment rates, substandard housing, and inadequate schools. Despite the reported findings of the gubernatorial commission, following the riot, city leaders and state officials failed to implement measures to improve the social and economic conditions of African Americans living in the Watts neighborhood. The Civil Rights Digital Library

Bill Ray's photographs from Watts are included in the exhibition "The Long Road: From Selma to Ferguson" through September 27, 2015.

A year after the Watts Riots in 1965, LIFE magazine revisited the neighborhood through a series of color pictures by photographer Bill Ray. (Via Time.com)

GO WEST

Bill Ray: Hells Angels, Los Angeles, 1965  ©Time Inc.

 

 

See you at Photo LA, Booth #203 - Thursday, January 15 - Sunday.

Bill Ray: My LIFE in Photography exhibit extended to February 8

Bill Ray: Hells Angels, Blackboard Cafe, 1965 ©Time Inc.

The wonderful The Eye of Photography, a daily magazine of photography, has today published a feature on the Bill Ray exhibition My LIFE in Photography. The full feature may be seen here.

We've had a tremendous response to the exhibit and as a result are pleased to announce the exhibit has been extended through February 8, 2015. We will also feature several of Bill Ray's photographs during the photo la fair in Los Angeles, January 15 - 18, in booth #203, Monroe Gallery of Photography.

View the exhibit on-line here.

Related articles: Those were the days: Bill Ray's photos capture the spirit of an age
                           LIFE’s Moments: Monroe Gallery celebrates the work of Bill Ray

Those were the days: Bill Ray's photos capture the spirit of an age

Via Pasatiempo
The Santa Fe New Mixican's Weekly Magazine of Arts, Entertainment, & Culture
by Paul Weideman

Bill Ray: Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy, May, 1962

 

The scene was President Kennedy’s forty-fifth birthday bash at Madison Square Garden, and Life photographer Bill Ray wanted to find a unique angle. He surreptitiously broke away from the police-cordoned press pod and climbed up above the stage. When Marilyn Monroe walked into the spotlight to sing her now-famous rendition of “Happy Birthday,” Ray had a perspective nobody else got, above and behind the sparkly dressed star. It was just one of hundreds of singular images made by the photographer, a sampling of which opens in a newly curated exhibit at Monroe Gallery of Photography on Friday, Nov. 28.


Ray was born in Shelby, Nebraska, in 1936, a few months before the first copy of Life magazine hit the stands. He started as a staff photographer at the Lincoln Journal Star the day after graduating from high school. At seventeen, he photographed President Dwight Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon, who were visiting Nebraska. During that time, he had the opportunity to meet Gen. Curtis LeMay. It was a foreshadowing of a career full of celebrity encounters.

He went on to work for United Press International in Chicago and for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune.Then, in 1957, he turned down a job with National Geographic to begin freelancing for Life. He was soon a staffer working out of the magazine’s New York, Beverly Hills, and Paris bureaus. In his 2007 photo-filled biography, My Life in Photography, Ray says it could also have been titled “My Life With Marlys,” after the woman he met in 1956 and married in 1958. She has been an invaluable assistant — and his agent, ever since Life folded in 1972.

The many subjects in Ray’s portfolio include a newly enlisted Elvis Presley about to board a troopship bound for Germany; John and Jackie Kennedy in the early 1960s, and Jackie and Aristotle Onassis later that decade; a stunning close-up of actress Natalie Wood; a fierce Muhammad Ali in the ring; George Harrison and Bob Dylan singing at the Concert for Bangladesh; baseball star Roger Maris at bat; Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate strolling along a London street; a series on Ronald Reagan and his family; and candids of artist Isamu Noguchi and cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. Ray also did two Army tours as a photographer in Vietnam.
 

After Life ceased publication, he freelanced for Newsweek, Archaeology, Smithsonian, and Fortune, and developed a portrait specialty. “One thing I’m still good at is people,” said Ray, whose recent work includes an official portrait of “a retiring big-time minister at St. Bart’s here in New York. His predecessors had all been painted in oil, and he wanted a photograph instead.”
 

Pasatiempo: Early on, your mother supported your desire to be a photographer, isn’t that right?
 

Bill Ray: She did. She was quite a character. Both my parents were just perfect. I had a terrific childhood. My mom was very busy with her art and loved the idea of my pursuing something like that. We were not by any means wealthy, but she always found money if I needed a camera.
 

Pasa: Your main role model was Alfred Eisenstaedt. Why him?
 

Ray: It was just from reading Life magazine and having a passion about photography. I loved growing up as a kid in a tiny little town, but as I got older it was clear that I wanted to get the hell out of there. My dad would have given me the lumberyard he owned, but I didn’t want to sell two-by-fours. I had a passion about going to New York and Life magazine. Fred Astaire was from Omaha, and when I saw him dance [in a movie] with Cyd Charisse in Central Park, that was it: I’m going.

Pasa: A lot of what you did were sort of Johnny-on-the-spot news assignments covering things like a Muhammad Ali fight or Nikita Khrushchev visiting a farm in Iowa.
 

Ray: That’s right, but I also originated a few ideas. For example, in 1959, there was a little story in the paper — every morning when I got up, I’d grab The New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, the Daily News, the [Daily] Mirror, and whatever else I could get my hands on — and there was a little story about a bunch of people in Detroit who were going to Alaska to homestead. I rushed over and showed the picture editor the story, and he said, “Go ahead, go.” I was very enthusiastic and worked very hard on every assignment. You have to be intense and keep going. That’s the only way to keep the assignments coming.
 

Pasa: It was pretty competitive?
 

Ray: Oh, god, at Life magazine, yeah. Everybody in the world wanted to work there.
 

Pasa: You used many different kinds of cameras. To shoot Andy Warhol, you had a giant Polaroid camera, and on the other end of the spectrum there’s a picture in the book of you at age eleven, concentrating on the viewfinder of a Speed Graphic.
 

Ray: That’s when I belonged to the Omaha Camera Club. The tiny village I grew up in was 90 miles away, so we’d go into Omaha once a week. It’s there that I met my mentor, who was a brilliant commercial photographer. He really got me on the right road to how photography technically works. The Speed Graphic was the basic tool at the newspaper I started working at when I turned seventeen in May 1953. I had a Leica and a Rolleiflex and a Linhof, but you really had to use the 4 x 5 [medium-format camera] to make the deadlines.
 

Pasa: I would think the bigger camera with the film holders was slower than a 35-millimeter camera.
 

Ray: But for most assignments, you shoot just one or two holders [two shots in each holder], and you come rushing in and soup [develop] that, and you can print a 4 x 5 negative wet.
 

Pasa: I read that Marlys always traveled with you and loaded the cameras.
 

Ray: Yeah, and she was the fastest there was at loading a Hasselblad, and she always kept the film straight. You have to know which roll is which, because I would say, “We’re going to push this roll a half [in development time to increase contrast],” or whatever. Under pressure, you have the president or Moshe Dayan and only a limited amount of time, so you really shoot like hell. We traveled a lot. We spent months in Japan, and we traveled for about 10 months with Carl Sagan around the world.
 

Pasa: Sid Monroe at the gallery told me that Life never ran the photos you took of the Hells Angels.

Bill Ray: Hells Angels, Los Angeles, 1965

 

Ray: The story was killed by the managing editor. I heard that he said, “I don’t want these smelly bastards in my magazine.” And that was after I worked on it a month. The thing about the Hells Angels is that they are now very popular. Marlys and I found those negatives and got them online, and the emails from all over the world are astounding.
 

Pasa: Your abilities show up in composition, people’s expressions and body language, and lighting — and most of what you did for Life was shot in ambient light.
 

Ray: That’s right, although I did almost 50 covers for Newsweek, for example, of Luciano Pavarotti and Itzhak Perlman, and those were all strobe. Another thing about the technique is that in those days — it seems so long ago now — you had to focus and you had to have the right exposure. Even though this digital revolution is truly a revolution — it’s just so huge it’s hard to comprehend — the basics, lighting and composition, are so important.

 

Natalie Wood on the set of "Sex and the single girl", with hairdressers, 1963

One of the places I learned composition was going to museums and looking at paintings. You kind of develop an instinct about the composition. But you have to be really fast. That’s the fun part. ◀

50 YEARS AGO: The Night Marilyn Sang to JFK

 

Marilyn Monroe Singing "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy,

Madison Square Garden, NY, 1962

©Bill Ray

On May 19, 1962 - half-century ago, on a spring night in New York City, 35 year-old screen goddess Marilyn Monroe — literally sewn into a sparkling, jaw-droppingly sheer dress — sauntered onto the stage of New York's Madison Square Garden and, with one breathless performance, forever linked sex and politics in the American consciousness. For the 15,000 spectators there that night, including LIFE photographer Bill Ray, Marilyn's "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy amplified the buzz about an affair between the two. But beyond the titillation, the moment Ray captured in this, his most iconic shot, went on to play a major role in both Marilyn's and JFK's biographies, coming as it did near the end of their short lives. As the 48th anniversary of that legendary birthday party approaches, Ray sits down with LIFE.com to share his photos from that night, most of which have never been seen, and to tell the story of how he overcame countless obstacles — the cavernous setting, tricky lighting, and security "goons" eager to keep the press at bay — to get The Shot. --- Life.com

Watch: Bill Ray's memories

Madison Square Garden Memories

"On the evening of May 19th, 1962, the brightest stars in the Hollywood galaxy joined Hollywood’s heaviest hitters and New York’s power elite at the old Madison Square Garden to celebrate with President John F. Kennedy his 45th birthday.


It was a good time to be young. The country was “moving” again. Our fathers had voted for Eisenhower; we voted for JFK. We had the Peace Corps, were going to the moon, and the New Frontier was here. It was High Tide in America.

With Jack Benny as host, and a long list of stars that featured Maria Callas, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Durante and Peggy Lee, the evening was going to be great. But the moment every one of the 17,000 guests was waiting for, was for the Queen of Hollywood, the reigning Sex Goddess, Marilyn Monroe to serenade the dashing young President.

Venus was singing to Zeus, or maybe Apollo. Their stars would cross, their worlds would collide.

I was on assignment for Life Magazine, and one of many photographers down in front of the stage.

As the show was about to start, the New York police, with directions from the Secret Service, were forcing the Press into a tight group behind a rope. I knew that all the “rope-a-dopes” would get the same shot, and that would not work for LIFE, the great American picture magazine. I squeezed between the cops and took off looking for a better place.

In addition to 2 Leicas with 35mm and 28mm lenses, and 2 Nikons with 105mm and 180mm, I brought along a new 300mm 4.5 Kilfit just for the Hell of it. I started to work my way up, one level at a time, looking for a place where I could get a shot of both MM and JFK in the same frame. An impossibility behind the rope, the 300mm telephoto was looking better and better.

It seemed that I climbed forever, feeling like Lawrence Harvey in “The Manchurian Candidate” up among the girders. When I found a pipe railing to rest the lens on, (exposure was by guess), I could see JFK through the telephoto, but the range of light level was too great. I worked with feverish intensity every second MM was on stage, but only one moment was truly magical, and perfectly exposed!

When the moment came, the Garden went black. Then all sound stopped. All that low buzz/roar that a crowd gives off stopped; total silence.

One very bright spotlight flashed on, and there was Marilyn Monroe, in the dress, the crystals sparkling and flashing. Marilyn was smiling, waiting several beats, with everyone on the edge of their seats, trying to hear the silence.

Then, in her breathy, sexy, unique voice, looking the entire time at JFK in the front row, she sang "Happy Birthday Mr. President”.

No one that night could imagine that in two and a half months, Marilyn would be dead of an overdose; in eighteen months JFK would be assassinated; Viet Nam would turn into our worst nightmare; Camelot would be gone.

Marilyn wore a dress designed by Jean Louis, that had no zippers, buttons, hooks, or snaps. The pieces were sewn together on her body. It was more or less flesh-colored, and decorated with thousands of Zwarovski crystals. Adlai Stevenson described it as “Skin and Beads”.

It was auctioned off at Christie’s in New York, October, 1999 for over 1.2 million dollars. The buyers later thought it was a steal, and said they were prepared to pay 3 million.

Though the evening was long and illustrious, and Marilyn’s song was short, the world, myself included, only remembers her, the song, the dress, and JFK’s 45th birthday.

The rest is history. " -- ©Bill Ray

President John F. Kennedy at his birthday party after Marilyn Monroe Sang "Happy Birthday", Madison Square Garden, NY, 1962 ©Bill Ray

WARHOL TO THE RESCUE!

Bill Ray: Andy Warhol with Polaroid camera, New York, 1980

The dust has not yet settled from this week's Contemporary auctions, but work by Andy Warhol was clearly one of the big highlights - especially photo-based paintings. The top lot was Andy Warhol’s 1963-64 “Self- Portrait,” made of four photo-booth-strip images in different shades of blue. It went for $38.4 million, above the $30 million high estimate, after a tortuous -- some dealers said tedious -- bidding war between private art dealer Philippe Segalot and a telephone client of Brett Gorvy, deputy chairman and international head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s. The price was an auction record for a Warhol portrait. (Via Bloomberg)

"Self-Portrait" (1963-1964) by Andy Warhol, acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas.

Source: Christie's via Bloomberg

"The market for important works by Andy Warhol, the reigning king of Pop, continued to reach new heights at Christie’s New York tonight, as bidders chased two iconic self-portraits by the artist, setting a new world auction record for a Warhol portrait in the process." Artdaily.org

"Sixteen Jackies" by Andy Warhol, silk screen on canvas.

Source: Sotheby's via Bloomberg

At the Sotheby's sale on Tuesday evening, a Warhol from 1964, "Sixteen Jackies" (est. $20-30 million), featuring a mixed composition of several Jacqueline Kennedy portraits in blue, brown, and white sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for $20,242,500 . Most experts thought that excessive estimates dampened enthusiasm at Sotheby's $128 Million Contemporary Art Auction.
 
The four images of Jacqueline Kennedy, each repeated four times, were enlargements of news photographs that appeared widely and continually in the media after the assassination. Taken from issues of Life magazine, the images depict, from top to bottom: Jackie stepping off the plane upon arrival at Love Field in Dallas; stunned at the swearing-in ceremony for Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One after the president's death; grieving at the Capitol; and smiling in the limousine before the assassination. 16 Jackies combines a number of themes important in Warhol's work, such as his fascination with American icons and celebrities, his interest in the mass media and the dissemination of imagery, and his preoccupation with death.

Bill Ray: Andy Warhol with 20 x 24 Polaroid Camera, New York, 1980

The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel."--Andy Warhol, 1975


Related: Composing The Artist: Photographs of Artists and Writers