Farewell Performance

One day in 1870, a Madison Avenue minister refused to officiate at the funeral of Actor George Holland and thereby helped make one of Manhattan's landmarks. There was "a little church around the corner" where the funeral might be held, the minister suggested, and actors have been going to the Little Church Around the Corner, on 29th Street just off Fifth Avenue, ever since.

Last week 300 of them turned out at a luncheon to honor the Rev. Dr. J. H. Randolph Ray, rector of the Little Church (officially, the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration), who will retire next month on his 72nd birthday. Master of ceremonies was Cornelia Otis Skinner, who hailed Mississippi-born Dr. Ray as "our spiritual stage manager and director." His star-hung cast for the occasion included Ralph Bellamy. Howard Lindsay, Peggy Wood, William Gaxton and Vinton Freedley, but the brightest was Tallulah Bankhead. Rising, she turned to New York's Bishop Horace W. B. Donegan and began "Your Grace . . .", then looked at the array of prelates on the dais and gave up. "Oh, the hell with it," she said, and began all over again: "My beloved Dr. Ray . . ."

Tallulah came to the flock originally as "kissin' kin" of the rector; her mother's uncle was Dr. Ray's great-grandfather. One day she approached him and explained: "Dahling, I'm the only unregenerate heathen among my friends. Even Bea Lillie goes to church every Sunday. I'd like to be confirmed. Can't you do something?" Dr. Ray recalls that "she came regularly for instruction, and on the morning of the ceremony she telephoned early. 'Dahling,' she said, 'I know I'm not supposed to eat anything, but may I have a drink of water?' Of water, I told her, but not anything stronger! And I was answered by throaty laughter over the phone--for, say what you will of Tallulah, she is a very honest girl."

Apart from actors, the picturesque Little Church's internationally famed specialty is the happy sacrament of marriage. Much of Dr. Ray's ministry has been devoted to interviewing and advising prospective brides and grooms. In his 35 years as rector--only the third in the church's no-year history--about 65,000 weddings have been performed at the Little Church, some 25,000 of them by Dr. Ray himself.

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