Margaret Whiting, Nightclub Star & Gay Porn Star's Wife, Dies at 86

Margaret Whiting came from pop royalty. Her dad wrote classics like "Hooray for Hollywood" and Shirley Temple's "One the Good Ship Lollipop." Her sister was an actress and singer. Her aunt was a pop singer.

She was born in Detroit, but moved soon to New York, then Los Angeles.

She came of age during World War II, and she became one of the most popular big-band singers at a time when the Big Band sound reigned supreme and every band was fronted by a female singer. With her signature blonde hair and good looks, she fit the part.

She had a long and close relationship with Johnny Mercer, one of America's greatest lyricists. She had met him through her father when she was only 6. She helped popularize the classic "That Old Black Magic" and Rodgers' and Hammerstein's "It Might As Well Be Spring," which became her trademark.

She continued to perform up until recently. She showcased in nightclubs in Manhattan, where she lived until March of last year, when she moved to a nursing home in Northern New Jersey.

She had an affair with the talented but doomed actor John Garfield and was married three times. But it was her relationship with Jack Wrangler that provided fodder for gossip columns.

Whiting met Wrangler in the 1970s. He was 22 years younger than her (long before anyone had heard of "cougars") and, with Al Parker and Casey Donovan, the first bona fide gay porn superstar to emerge in the freedom of the post-Stonewall scene.

According to Wikipedia, she met him "when she attended one of his one-man erotic shows in New York City" -- presumably, at one of the porn palaces then flourishing around Times Square.

"I was with my manager when I looked over at Margaret, who was surrounded by five guys in a booth," Wrangler (born John Stillman) later recalled. "There she was with the hair, the furs and the big gestures. I thought, 'Boy, now that's New York! That's glamour!' I had to meet her." Other accounts have them meeting in a nightclub.

In a famous exchange, Wrangler initially protested, "But I'm gay!" to which she responded "Only around the edges, dear."

She apparently knew something millions of men didn't. Because the two hit it off famously and became a devoted couple. Wrangler later said he was gay -- not bisexual. "I could never live a gay lifestyle because I'm much too competitive," he once told an interviewer. "When I was with a guy I would always want to be better than him: what we were accomplishing, what we were wearing - anything. With a woman you compete like crazy, but coming from different points of view, and as far as I'm concerned, that was doable."

Wrangler later helped get on Broadway in 1997, Dream, a tribute to Johnny Mercer, starring his wife. He also co-wrote the book for a musical, I Love You, Jimmy Valentine, which also starred Whiting.

In the mid-1980s, he appeared in the play Soul Survivor, probably the first comedy about AIDS, a raw subject at the time. Wrangler was himself the subject of a much-admired documentary Wrangler, Anatomy of an Icon, wrote and produced several other shows.

But it was as a porn star that he is best known. He appeared in 47 films, including the classics Kansas City Trucking Co. and A Night at the Adonis. He was a porn superstar in the '70s, but he also was the first gay porn star (and still one of the very few) to cross over to straight porn. He had a role in The Devil in Miss Jones, one of the most famous porn films ever made.

A heavy smoker, Wrangler died of emphysema in 2009. By all accounts, the couple's relationship was unorthodox but deeply loving until the end.