Nicholas Ray
The Glorious Failure of an
American Director
Patrick McGilligan
Dedication
To the memory of my friend Joel Gersmann,
another glorious Wisconsin director
(1942–2005)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One - The Iron Fist, the Velvet Glove
Chapter Two - “Struggle Is Grand”
Chapter Three - Agitation of the Essence
Chapter Four - “Ungathered”
Chapter Five - Atmosphere of Fear
Chapter Six - Mr. Nice Guy
Chapter Seven - Bread and Taxes
Chapter Eight - The Golden World
Chapter Nine - Circle of Isolation
Chapter Ten - Lost Causes
Chapter Eleven - The Martyrlogue
Chapter Twelve - Project X
Filmography
Other Credits
Permissions
Index
Sources and Acknowledgments
Photo Insert
About the Author
Notes
Also by Patrick McGilligan
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
The Iron Fist, the Velvet Glove
AUGUST 7, 1911
Nicholas Ray was a kind of human jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of his mystery scattered and lost over time.
Many of his films were haunted by bruised young people, threatened, damaged, or twisted by events beyond their control. Their suffering often begins in youth, its source a secret buried there.
Mementos of childhood crop up in Ray’s films like missing pieces of the puzzle. Sports trophies line the top of a dresser in the room of an embittered detective in On Dangerous Ground. A broken-down rodeo champion finds a rodeo handbill, cap pistol, and tobacco-can bank squirreled away in a crawl space under his old homestead in The Lusty Men. (“I was looking for something I thought I lost,” he tells an old-timer carrying a shotgun who interrupts his search.) Sprawled drunkenly on the ground, James Dean pulls a scrap-paper blankie over a cymbal-banging monkey toy during the opening credits of Rebel Without a Cause. (“Can I keep it?” he pleads when arrested.)
Even so, the source of hurt is private and vague and remote—not, as in the case of another Wisconsin filmmaker, as knowable as a certain Rosebud sled.
In his films, Ray tended to load the blame on mother and father figures. The parents in Rebel Without a Cause are fundamentally clueless. The drug-addicted father in Bigger Than Life tries to use a scissors to sacrifice his young son to God. Fathers are faulted the most in Ray’s films, while mothers linger in the shadows, blurry and complicit.
His unorthodox “heroes” (the drug-addicted father is one) are destined to fail. The obstacles they face are nothing compared to their own neuroses. They are burdened above all by their integrity.
Ray’s intense, searching visual style mirrored his personal struggles. His best films—a list that would arguably include They Live by Night, In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground, The Lusty Men, Johnny Guitar, Rebel Without a Cause, Bigger Than Life, Bitter Victory, and Party Girl—can’t easily be categorized. They owe something to Hollywood, where he never quite fit in, and everything else to his iconoclastic sensibility. First to the influential French critics of Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif in the 1950s, and to every succeeding generation of film fans since, Ray has become a symbol of artistic purity and tragic flaws: a test case of auteurist worship.
In his life, as in his films, everything began at home—hope and trouble, strength and fissures.
Home sweet home for Nicholas Ray was an all-American city that was rugged and beautiful, as ideal on the surface as an airbrushed portrait of the director at the peak of his fame.
Christened as a fur-trading post in 1841, La Crosse was settled on the eastern banks of the Mississippi River, at the confluence of the Black and La Crosse Rivers along what would become the border of Wisconsin (which became a state in 1848) and Minnesota (which followed in 1858). From a handful of houses, the town swiftly multiplied into a booming gateway to the West for merchants and adventurers. Germans and Norwegians swarmed in on packed trains and cattle cars from Milwaukee. By 1880, La Crosse had grown into the fourth-largest community in Wisconsin.
“Here is a town,” declared the former steamboat pilot Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, in his 1883 tall-tale memoir and travelogue Life on the Mississippi, “with electric lighted streets, and blocks of buildings, which are stately enough and also architecturally fine enough to command respect in any city. It is a choice town.” And a choice setting: With its lush greenery and majestic bluffs spared by the Ice Age, surrounding fertile farmlands, crystalline rivers and lakes, dense forests, and plentiful hunting and fishing, the area was hailed locally as “God’s Country.”
By the early 1880s, members of a German clan named Kienzle had reached God’s Country. Nicholas Ray’s German-born grandparents stopped briefly in the Teutonic stronghold of Milwaukee before heading to La Crosse, where they would eventually raise a brood of three sons and five daughters. Their oldest son, Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, was born in Milwaukee in 1863; he would wed twice, the first time at a tender age in Milwaukee, before meeting Nicholas Ray’s mother. Kienzle’s second marriage, in La Crosse in 1888, didn’t last much longer than the first, though it produced two daughters, who continued to live near their father after their parents divorced.
An enigmatic, forbidding figure Raymond N. Kienzle was, as Ray himself recalled him. In his earliest photographs he wears an ironic smile, but later in life a walrus mustache and the El Producto cigar invariably lodged in his mouth gave him the gravitas of a successful tradesman. The Kienzles were building contractors, specializing in masonry, brick, and stonework for public edifices and luxurious homes for rich clientele, and in the 1890s Raymond, the oldest son, took over the family business.
Late in that decade, Kienzle got a big job renovating Gale College, a Presbyterian institution recently absorbed by the Lutheran ministry, in the town of Galesville, about twenty-five miles north of La Crosse. While there he met a quiet and kindhearted woman eleven years his junior. Slender and bespectacled Olene Toppen, known as Lena, had been raised on a nearby farm, one of nine children born to parents who were natives of Norway.
The couple married in 1898 and soon moved onto four acres near Galesville. Their land included a brickyard factory where Kienzle employed a handful of workers. Kienzle took local commissions, including a cement archway entrance to Galesville’s High Cliff Park, but also jobs that took him away for weeks elsewhere in the Midwest and as far as the Deep South.
All four of the couple’s children were born in the small town of Galesville: three girls—Alice (b. 1900), Ruth (b. 1903), Helen (b. 1905)—and, at last, a son. Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr. came bawling into the world on August 7, 1911. As a boy he would be called “Junior” or “Ray,” and in due time he would drop the name “Kienzle,” reverse the order of his first and middle names, and adopt “Nicholas Ray” as his identity.
After he turned fifty, Raymond Sr. decided to cut back on his factory work and travel. He put the trappings of his business—the brick machines, molders and sanders, kiln, sheds and tools, and the Galesville land itself—up for sale, and in stages moved his family back to La Crosse, purchasing a series of houses co-owned or shared by Kienzle relatives. By 1920 the Kienzles had landed in a house at 226 West Avenue North, near the corner of Vine, facing west toward downtown and, just about a mile away, the river the Indians called “the Father of Waters.”
Especially after Rebel Without a Cause, the m
ythology surrounding Nicholas Ray tended to highlight stories of a misspent youth, complete with drinking, truancy, car thievery, brushes with the police, and flirtations with his father’s mistresses.
In many ways, however, his boyhood offers a scrapbook of an American idyll.
Galesville wasn’t far from La Crosse, and in the early years the Kienzles made regular trips to the bigger city for shopping, holidays, and visits to relatives. It was the city’s first-rate public schools that eventually lured the family to return there permanently. Although the countryside was still dotted with a few tepees, and scattered steamboats continued to roam the Mississippi, by 1920 Mark Twain’s “choice town” had transformed itself from prairie way station to glittering metropolis. La Crosse’s streets were lit with electricity and paved with stone, whizzing with automobiles and streetcars; most neighborhoods had sidewalks and garbage collection, and thousands of households had telephones.
La Crosse had cause for civic pride, though the lives of its citizens were subject to the whims of extreme weather. The wind whipped across the Mississippi—perhaps not quite “like emery cloth tearing across their faces,” as René Hardy wrote of the searing ghibli in Bitter Victory, but turbulently in the summers and frigidly in the winters. Those winters, which brought snow and ice before Thanksgiving most years, were the real endurance test. Yet La Crossians embraced the season with skiing and skating and an annual winter carnival that featured dozens of floats and fur-wrapped marching bands and employee clubs representing local businesses. Ray must have remembered the strong wind, for it often blew dramatically through key scenes of his films—sending up a murderous sandstorm in Bitter Victory, howling outside as Mercedes McCambridge makes her grand entrance in Johnny Guitar, blowing back the hair of the mourning teenage rebels standing cliff-side in Rebel Without a Cause.
The Kienzles lived on a street with several other Kienzle aunts and uncles, in a two-story house that was large but not architecturally fine: “a big yellow barn,” remembered Ferdinand Sontag, a neighbor and classmate of Ray’s. The living room featured a parquet floor and an Italian marble fireplace; antlered heads decorated the walls, and the family’s shelves were crammed with books. There was a separate piano room; Lena Kienzle played violin, and all her children learned to play at least one musical instrument. For supper, the dining room was set with linen and lace; for parties and holidays, the house filled with relatives, friends, and flowers.
By 1920, Ray’s father was semiretired, but he still took small jobs as a bricklayer, cement man, and plasterer. He was active in the chamber of commerce, while his wife earned plaques volunteering with the Red Cross and Community Chest. Though raised as a Catholic, Raymond Sr. had been excommunicated after his first divorce; for a time he joined the Congregational Church, but eventually drifted away from organized religion. His wife, brought up as a strict Lutheran, trended toward Methodism and faithfully took her children to services and Sunday school. Ray Jr. had been steeped in the Bible, long before the temerity of his film King of Kings.
Ray Jr. was a Boy Scout, a good boy who delivered patriotic speeches in grade school. On Election Day in 1924, as President Calvin Coolidge faced off against Democratic candidate John W. Davis and Wisconsin Progressive Robert M. La Follette Sr., the thirteen-year-old eighth-grader urged his Lincoln Junior High School classmates to remind their parents to vote.
All three of Ray’s sisters doted on their young brother, the only boy in the family. His siblings were all pretty, with wavy hair like their mother’s, good-humored but serious-minded, anxious to leave home and La Crosse.
They also nursed ambitions beyond marriage. The eldest, Alice, had already graduated from nursing school by the time of her young brother’s Election Day speech; after exchanging vows in the Kienzle living room, she moved with her husband to Madison, the college town that was swiftly surpassing La Crosse in size and prospects and glamour. The next-oldest sister, Ruth, was on the verge of departing for Chicago. One by one the girls left—with Ray Jr.’s favorite, Helen, closest to him in age, the last to go.
Ray felt particularly close to Helen—close enough that, in one of his autobiographical jottings, he confessed that his first crush was on her. “Ever since I was four and she was nine I’ve wanted to make it with my sister Helen,” he noted wryly, “because she was my sister.” Years later, reflecting on some of his adult relationships, he would joke about a history of similar improprieties and feeling “bent towards incest with other people’s children and wives, ex-wives, and daughters and such.”
By the time Ray was a freshman at La Crosse Central High School, Helen too had graduated and was planning her escape. The table settings dwindled at home. Ray felt abandoned and lonesome, and this loneliness, which was with him from earliest memory, never abated. It was fundamental to his character and the themes of his films—which were often preoccupied with “the loneliness of man,” he noted, peopled by characters who suffer “much agony and much searching,” culminating in a private despair.
In youth and manhood alike, Ray too was a soul-searcher in tortured colloquy with himself.
His mother lavished attention on the girls, but when it came to Ray Jr. she deferred to her husband.
Raymond N. Kienzle Sr. was tall, his size and erect carriage lending him a larger-than-life air. The filmmaker romanticized his father later in life, once boasting that Raymond Sr. had “built levees, docking areas for steamboats and dykes against floods,” as well as “colleges, creameries, whorehouses, cathedrals, and breweries.” Beyond his success as a contractor, his father had other positive qualities: Raymond Sr. loved music and literature, politically a Republican, he was known to speak out against racial prejudice at the dinner table. In 1924 he may even have voted for the spoiler La Follette, who carried only one state—Wisconsin.
But Raymond Sr. cast a formidable shadow. His son’s delinquency started as early as his Boy Scout years, by which time he was already smoking and drinking and playing hooky. A stern disciplinarian, the father had an iron fist, punishing his son physically for his indiscretions. And there was something else: As the director put it once, he was raised under “the lash of alcoholism.” Though Lena Kienzle was a teetotaler, her husband was a dedicated alcoholic. Drinking was one way to imitate his father. “All during childhood and Prohibition,” the filmmaker recalled years later, “there was booze in the house, and on the street. At home it was for stealing: I stole my first pint at ten. On the street it was for buying—grain alcohol mixed with sugar and hot water—with money stolen from home. . . .
“I learned about Aqua Velva long before I started shaving. No, I didn’t drink it. I poured it over the sheets or into the bathtub to clear the smell of my puke.”
The household was filled with tension. Ray’s parents slept in separate bedrooms, and after dinner Raymond Sr. often disappeared, prowling a city that despite Prohibition was flush with speakeasies and saloons. Sometimes he didn’t come home until the next day.
“If he had the guts to knock Mom cold once,” Jim Stark (James Dean) muses harshly in Rebel Without a Cause, “then maybe she’d be happy and stop picking on him.”
Raymond Sr. had a series of mistresses, one of whom his son learned about around age fourteen. “At fifteen, I made an unsuccessful pass at her,” he recalled ruefully. Womanizing, a lifelong habit embedded in his youth, was another way for the son to emulate his father.
Raymond Sr. loved flashy cars—his name often appeared in the local paper as one of the first owners when a shipment of new models landed in town—and he had ulterior motives for teaching his young son to drive. “I learned to drive when I was thirteen,” Ray recalled, “so I could get my father home safe from his nightly rounds of speakeasies and bootleggers. Sometimes I’d wait for him in the car and masturbate.” This peculiar father-son bond—this sharing of drink and women and cars, often with punishment lurking—became a blueprint for what filmmaker Mark Rappaport described as the “Gordian knot of unbelievably complicated father-son,
older man–young man relationships” in Ray’s life and films.
In 1927, the Kienzle family changed forever. One night in the fall, Raymond Sr. went missing. Searching for him, Ray tracked down his father’s current mistress in “a speakeasy across from a brewery my father had built. She led me to a hotel room. He was lying in sweat and puke, with puke pans on the floor at the side of the bed. I took him home and nursed him through the night.” Twenty years later, that memory was echoed by dialogue he wrote for Farley Granger’s character, recalling his own youthful trauma, for a scene in They Live by Night: “Pa turned to me like he was trying to say something. I saw his face . . . white. Like he was gonna cry.”
Ray dragged his father home to recover. The next day he skipped his Latin class, as usual, decamping to a pool hall to practice three-cushion billiards with pals. His mother had to track him down by phone to tell him his father had passed away.
Convinced that the doctor who had treated his father was a dope addict (“before I left for school I watched him heat a substance in a spoon and draw it into a hypodermic”), Ray persuaded his mother to file a lawsuit against the physician. When the court date came, however, Ray was “so pissed on home brew” that he “couldn’t testify,” so his family lost.
“The next day I saw the doctor walking on Main Street,” Ray said. “I was driving a new Oakland Cabriolet. I was drunk. I ran the car at him across from the cathedral my father had built. A fire hydrant got in the way.”
No documents have survived to verify Ray’s account of the malpractice suit or the reckless driving citation (“my first ticket”) he recalled receiving for the hydrant incident. Yet his father’s death is documented in official records and the city newspaper: Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Sr. died on November 11, 1927, at the age of sixty-four. Ray’s three sisters, now all married, returned to La Crosse to grieve. Though the Kienzles kept in close touch and clung to each other in many ways, they wouldn’t reunite for another twenty years.
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