Classic comedian Martha Ray married six times in less than two decades. [music] But one bizarre detail about her seventh marriage still made it the most shocking one of all. Born into performing, Martha Ray spent her career trying desperately to win the hearts of her audience and prove her own self-worth. Tragically, her personal life was little different.
In the end, although she made countless people laugh, she only made herself cry right up to her bitter final moments. According to one story, Ray was literally born to entertain. Her mother Mabel and her father Peter were vaudeville entertainers. And Mabel reportedly gave birth to their daughter backstage at the theater in Butte, Montana before heading back to work two days later.
Indeed, as children, Ray and her brother Bud inherited their parents’ thirst for the spotlight and starred in their own act, Reed and Hooper, after their parents’ last names, which got changed to Bud and Margie when audiences began flocking to them. In particular, Martha had a fantastic singing voice and expressive features even then. Even so, it took half a decade of nightclub jobs and minor Broadway roles before Ray got her big break. In 1936, she was working in a club doing comic skits when producer and director Norman Taurog walked in and was bowled over.
After all, by then, Ray had learned to wield her big features with comic precision. Taurog was so certain he had a star in his hands, he had her in front of the cameras the very next day. Acting in a comic routine on Rhythm on the Range, a film starring no less than Bing Crosby. Ray nailed it and Paramount Pictures signed her on a contract devoted to comedic roles.
She was an instant smash [music] hit, with her enormous smile earning her the lasting nickname Big Mouth. Over the decades, Ray acted alongside of some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, supporting the likes of Bob Hope, W.C. Fields, and Abbott and Costello with her signature zany humor and outsized facial expressions. In fact, her look and style were so distinctive that she was soon a caricature in Hollywood.
In 1937, just a year after her film debut, the Warner Brothers cartoon The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos lampooned her as the jazzy donkey Mouth-a-Bray, while Disney parodied her in the cartoon Mother Goose Goes Hollywood, having her stand with an equally big-mouthed actor Joe E. Brown. But little did everyone know, Ray was already hiding something. She had spent her young life so devoted to entertainment that she had almost no formal schooling.
According to one report, she was so unfamiliar with reading that she needed to have many parts of her scripts read out loud to her. And she was vulnerable in other ways. For all her exaggerated qualities, Ray was actually only a diminutive 5’3" in, and despite a booming voice, she had a fundamentally self-deprecating quality about her. Sometimes, she used this tone to make people around her laugh, but at other times, it seemed to eat at her self-confidence.
Sadly, too many people were willing to take advantage of this. Almost as soon as she signed with Paramount, the 20-year-old Ray met and became infatuated with orchestra leader Johnny Torrence. By the summer of 1936, the pair were engaged. They just didn’t stay that way.
Two months later, Ray admitted, "I got engaged to Johnny Torrence one day and broke it off the next." This impulsivity turned into a tragic and rapidly degrading pattern. Just after her breakup with Johnny Torrence, Rae met makeup artist Hamilton Buddy Westmore and, once again, fell head over heels. This time, they followed through and got married in May of 1937, only to file for divorce four months later, citing extreme cruelty. Yet, the spiral kept going.
She married another three times in just six short years. And to add insult to injury, in 1938, her own father even briefly tried to sue her for financial support. So, when Rae married again to Nick Condos, just 19 days after her latest divorce, she hoped it would last forever. After all, she did have a little girl, Melody, just five months later.
And the marriage did change things. Martha Raye’s fourth marriage to Nick Condos was her longest by [music] far, changing her pattern. Her career went through a transformation, too. In 1942, the United States entered World War II and Rae joined up with the USO, a nonprofit that organizes entertainment for troops abroad with the help of famous comedians and performers.
The USO adored Rae’s work and her fellow Hollywood volunteers couldn’t help but notice how much joy she brought to the men and women in uniform and how much joy these men and women brought her. As fellow USO regular Bob Hope once commented about Rae’s soothing effect, "She was Florence Nightingale, Dear Abby, [music] and the only singer who could be heard over the artillery fire." Still, all this came at a great cost. One of Rae’s chief duties while working for the USO was to fly over to where the fighting was and boost morale on foreign US bases. But Ray had a deathly fear of flying and each time she took these trips, she felt she was taking her life in her hands.
Even as she also felt it was her duty to go. In a coping mechanism that would only worsen with time, Ray began drinking copiously on these trips so she wouldn’t even remember it when she landed. It would take time for this to catch up with her though and in 1947, Ray hit one of the peaks of her professional life. That year, famed comedian Charlie Chaplin cast her as his co-star in Monsieur Verdoux, a comedy about a Bluebeard-esque man marrying and then killing wealthy women to get their money.
Critics praised Ray’s performance, particularly her ability to hold her own next to Chaplin and it’s considered one of her best works to this day. Ray was also one of the earliest proponents of television and in 1954, she began the fourth time successful Martha Raye Show. By then, her marriage to Nick Condos had ended and she married for a fifth time, this time to Edward T. Bagley.
As her popular show courted high ratings with guest stars ranging from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Cesar Romero, the now 38-year-old Ray prepared to settle down into the rest of her life. As always, it just didn’t work out that way. In 1956, a series of tragedies hit Ray. For one, her marriage to Bagley broke down leading to yet another divorce after just two years together.
To make matters worse, the Martha Raye Show was canceled. Ray didn’t merely take these personal and professional losses badly. She nearly ended up destroying her life. Ray had continued serving for the USO throughout the Korean War in the early 1950s, leading to more of her dreaded plane flights.
On top of that, one of her favorite vacation spots was now Miami, Florida, which also necessitated a flight. So, Ray’s drinking had increased tenfold to mortifying effect. Like everything she did, Ray was not a quiet drinker. And by now, many airlines, especially those that serve the Florida area, were well aware of Ray’s difficult and disorderly reputation on flights.
Before long, they even began refusing to sell the comedian airplane tickets, knowing that any flight with her was sure to devolve into chaos. Eventually, on August 14th, 1956, the worst happened. Lonely, depressed, and embarrassed, Ray took a handful of sleeping pills while in Miami. Thankfully, she was saved just in time and spent a period of recovery in St.
Francis Hospital in Miami. And it was actually her recuperation that taught Ray to hope again. When the world heard about Ray’s hospitalization, they sent her an outpouring of love and gifts, reminding her of her loving audience. Ray especially treasured the St.
Christopher’s medal, the St. Genesius medal, and the Star of David that fans sent to her, and wore them forever after. [music] Meanwhile, she was so grateful for the nuns who had cared for her at St. Francis Hospital after her attempt, that she remembered them publicly every chance she could.
In the future, whenever she came to the end of the TV show she was on, she would sign off with, "Goodnight, sisters." as a token of her gratitude. But this new start didn’t mean she didn’t stumble. In the end, Ray likely had too much hope when she married again for the sixth time to Robert Osborne in November 1956, just months after her hospitalization. After nearly 4 years, the marriage ended with little fanfare in December of 1960, but it did apparently leave a lasting impression as Ray would be single for the next 30 years.
But all this time, while Ray had been focusing on her career and her husbands, her daughter Melody got tragically lost in the shuffle. Ray never had much of a childhood, and she likewise never seemed to get the hang of being a mother, especially as Melody became a teenager and then a young adult. In particular, Ray was used to running the shots in her professional life, and she expected her daughter to fall in line just like a cameraman would. So when Melody’s father Nick died, Ray tried to take control and insisted he not be cremated.
Melody disobeyed and cremated him anyway, [music] and Ray was so angry that she temporarily cut her daughter off. Unfortunately, Ray would soon need all the support she could get. By the 1960s, Ray had been suffering from health issues for years, particularly anemia, and would go on to be plagued with blood pressure and circulation problems. One day in 1962, bystanders even discovered her unconscious on a beach in Malibu.
But Ray didn’t heed this warning sign. As always, she just kept working. In 1966, Ray pushed through her difficulties and picked her USO duties back up, going over to entertain servicemen and women in the Vietnam War. While there, she hardly took it easy, but then she never [music] did.
In the middle of one show Ray was performing for two Air Force platoons, the men got called up for an urgent mission. Ray was unfazed and simply held the show until they had come back. There were also reports that Ray would act as a nurse for the injured or just anyone needing care during her time with the USO. Eventually, her decades-long above and beyond efforts earned her the honorary rank of colonel in the Marines, the honorary rank of lieutenant colonel in the army, and the fifth special forces group airborne made her an honorary green beret, particularly for her work in the Vietnam War, and let her visit the highly confidential surveillance spot of Lake Horn in Laos.
And still, she didn’t slow down. Instead, Ray spent the 1970s and 1980s constantly working to keep her relevance. She frequently guest starred on classic shows like The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote, and was even canny enough to turn her big mouth image into becoming a spokesperson for Polident, complete with her own slogan. So, take it from a big mouth.
Extra strength Polident green gets tough stains clean. But in the end, work couldn’t save Ray from herself. In the early ’90s, Ray’s health took another nose dive, and she suffered a series of strokes that left her wheelchair-bound and largely unable to get around by herself. In this vulnerable state, at the age of 75, Ray met Mark Harris and, for the first time in over 30 years, decided to go back to the altar for the seventh time.
It may have been the biggest mistake of her life. From the beginning, everything about Mark Harris was alarming to both the press and Ray’s long-term friends. At 42 years old, Harris was 33 years Ray’s junior, and he primarily worked as her manager and press liaison, positions that could easily serve his own self-interest. Besides all that, Ray hadn’t known him a month before they tied the knot.
Then, in December of 1991, it turned truly suspicious. Ray went to see Bette Midler and James Caan’s new film For the Boys and had a disturbing reaction. She began crying and heaving in the theater. Not because she loved the movie, which is about two actors entertaining US troops, but because she believed that Midler had stolen from her life story and her long commitment to the USO.
That might have been the end of it. But then Mark Harris announced their intention to sue and urged on by her husband, Ray ended up in court with Midler. But although there was some indication that Ray’s biography was a partial inspiration for Midler’s character, nothing stuck and the judge dismissed the case after a long wrangle. Ray’s reputation in Hollywood was now damaged.
But by then, few could stay angry. Instead, they could only pity her. In 1993, Ray’s persistent circulation issues came back with a vengeance and took almost everything from her. After developing gangrene in her foot, she had to have part amputated.
Everyone could see the end was near. On October 19th, 1994, Martha Raye’s frail and failing body perished from pneumonia at the age of 78 She left behind a sterling professional resume and a complex personal legacy. Though she was still married to Harris at the very end. In the wake of her passing, her beloved US Army gave her one final heartbreaking tribute, burying her with full military honors at the Fort Bragg Main Post Cemetery for her work with the USO.
It’s likely Raye would have considered this her greatest achievement of all. If you enjoyed this Factinate video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe for more incredible stories. Your support means everything to us. Want to say in who we cover next?
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