Ray Bourbon
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Ray (or Rae) Bourbon (born Hallie Board Waddell; August 11, 1902 – July 19, 1971) was an American female impersonator, entertainer and vaudeville performer, noted for his "outrageous" risqué monologues. He mainly performed in nightclubs, gaining a following in the 1930s and 1940s, and issued several LPs of comic material during the 1950s. He died while serving a prison sentence, having been convicted of being an accomplice to murder.
Ray (or Rae) Bourbon (born Hallie Board Waddell; August 11, 1902 – July 19, 1971) was an American female impersonator, entertainer and vaudeville performer, noted for his "outrageous" risqué monologues. He mainly performed in nightclubs, gaining a following in the 1930s and 1940s, and issued several LPs of comic material during the 1950s. He died while serving a prison sentence, having been convicted of being an accomplice to murder.
Early life
Many details of Rae's life are disputed, as he had something of an unreliable narrator one who told many outrageous stories during his life. One friend stated: "Where Ray was concerned, we simply never knew what was real and what wasn't." Research published in 2021 indicates that he was born in Texarkana on August 11, 1902 as Hallie Board Waddell. He was also known as Hal Wadell (or Waddell), Hal Hughes, Richard Mann, Ramón Ícarez among others. Rae usually claimed this birth date, but FBI sources state that he once claimed that his birth was in 1892. In a 1937 application for a Social Security card, he gave his birth name as Hal Wadell, but at different times in his life claimed that he was the illegitimate son of a Texas congressman and/or that he was the "last of the Habsburg Bourbons" whose mother had traveled to the US shortly before giving birth. The recent research suggests that, after his mother, Elizabeth Waddell ( Wilhelm) remarried, Rae was recorded in the 1910 census as Hallie Hughes, and in 1920 as Hal Hughes, living at both dates in Texarkana. He claimed, apparently falsely, to have attended school in London, and to have first performed on stage there in 1913. According to the FBI, he returned to the US around 1917, married, and had a son, though again this appears to be untrue. Bourbon claimed to have been a stunt double for movie actresses and an uncredited actor in several silent films, notably Rudolph Valentino's Blood and Sand in 1922. Using the name Ramón Ícarez, he may have appeared as a dancer at the opening of the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1923. He also performed in vaudeville as one half of a double act with Bert Sherry and toured the US and England. In 1929, he worked in another double act, Scotch and Bourbon, and in 1931 (as Mr. Rae Bourbon) modeled women's dresses in a department store in Bakersfield, California. After receiving a large inheritance, perhaps as a result of his mother's death in 1929, he then wrote a novel, Hookers, published under the pseudonym of Richard F. Mann.
References
External links
Don't Call Me Madam - The Life and Work of Ray Bourbon Ray Bourbon photos, articles and clippings
Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1281395906 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.
References
1 documented disagreement in this article is reported without adjudication — see the claims table. 2 claims could not be tied to a specific sentence and are listed in the table below instead.