Just sixteen, Ray was bereft; he felt more alone and abandoned than ever. “Nick didn’t have a father,” Susan Ray, his fourth wife, insisted in an interview years later. “A drunk is not a father. I think he was looking for that. And when people have a piece missing they magnetize it in different ways.”
“I hated my father for dying too soon,” the director himself wrote with curious vehemence, “while in earlier years, when it was normal to want him out of the way—because he was a rival for the warmth of my mother, a witness to my fear, scorner of my pimples, withholder of money, knower of my sexual agonies, punisher of all my indiscretions, and an embarrassment in his work clothes and accent—I hadn’t been strong enough to kill him.”
Hate and love mingled uncomfortably in Ray’s psyche, and he never forgot those feelings of loss and need. “A boy needs a father at certain times in his life so he can kick him in the shins,” Ray reflected one time, “so he can fight for the love of his mother. The boy misbehaves at one point, runs away at another, while his father remains constant, a gauge against which the boy can measure himself. Take that away and the spine is lost.”
Raymond N. Kienzle Sr. had prospered with the growth of La Crosse, and in death he provided well.
According to probate files, Kienzle owned land parcels worth an estimated $15,000, and goods and savings worth another $6,000. His will granted no bequests for his five daughters (including the two daughters from his second marriage), all of whom were married to husbands with jobs and assets; nor did he set aside any sum for his underage son. The estate was consigned entirely to his wife, unless she remarried. Two years later, the Wall Street crash would rattle these holdings, but Lena Kienzle proved capable as a money manager. She never remarried, and she lasted on the inheritance until her death in 1959.
Twenty-one thousand dollars was a considerable sum in 1926, qualifying the Kienzles as solidly middle-class; the family even employed a maid. Still, their affluence didn’t hold a candle to the fortunes of the first families of La Crosse, the barons of lumber, railroads, rubber, and beer who lived in mansions in the city’s older, grander districts—mansions built by contractors like Kienzle himself.
Among these families were the Loseys, descended from Joseph W. Losey, a lawyer, district attorney, and city councilman who had helped bring the railroad and waterworks to La Crosse in the mid-nineteenth century, and acquired and laid out the spacious grounds of the city cemetery. Losey’s grandson and namesake, Joseph Losey, born in 1909, was an older classmate of Ray Kienzle Jr.’s at La Crosse Central High School.
The young son of a prominent family, Joseph Losey could drive his car along the city’s bluffs on Losey Boulevard, a scenic roadway named for his grandfather. He vacationed abroad with his family and left La Crosse behind after graduation, heading east to college. Ray Kienzle was fortunate to make the occasional trip to Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago; his was more like the family in Bigger Than Life, gazing at exotic posters for destinations they couldn’t afford to visit. Though the two young men grew up in the same time and place and attended the same schools—and both went on to become movie directors—the age and class differences between them meant that Ray Kienzle Jr. and Joseph Losey had only a nodding acquaintance in La Crosse. Their hometown connection would bring them closer as adults, in New York and Hollywood and still later in Europe.
Yet Losey recalled things quite differently. “His family had much more money than ours,” Losey insisted, though he himself was the true child of privilege. It was a mark of Losey’s character that he always assumed a posture of lowliness, while Ray hid his humbler origins by armoring himself with grandiosity. Mutual friends were sometimes fooled. “I knew them both in Hollywood,” recalled actress Betsy Blair. “It’s funny, both came from the same town in Wisconsin. One came, I heard, from a wealthy family, and the other came from the other side of the tracks. I assumed it was Nick who came from the wealthy family. He had a kind of elegance, arrogance, an aura, a princely manner, while Losey was [socially] awkward, often dressed messily, and [was] not so handsome.”
If Ray Kienzle Sr. was the iron fist, his wife Lena was the velvet glove.
If Nicholas Ray felt he was competing with his father, even for his mother’s love—if, like certain characters in his films, he wished he had done more to fight for her affection—perhaps it was because Mrs. Kienzle gave her children that love so freely. Ray’s mother pampered him throughout his childhood, and especially after her husband’s death.
In turn, Ray absorbed his mother’s temperament, developing a personality that couldn’t have been farther from that of a teenage delinquent. Despite his angst and streak of rebellion, he was sweet like his mother, earnest—in a word, nice. As an adult he would be the sweetest of all Hollywood directors, a breed more known for the iron-fistedness evinced by his father. “One of the nicest people I’ve met,” recalled Ernest Borgnine, who appeared in Ray’s films Johnny Guitar and Run for Cover, “as well as a helluva director.”
As a teenager, Ray had a beautiful smile and a repertoire of grins—sly, shy, amused, mischievous. Beneath them, however, he remained fundamentally restless and lonely. Though sometimes garrulous, Ray was also prone to long, ambiguous silences. Like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, who screams at his parents, “You’re not listening to me!” he yearned for someone to talk to—or to listen to him.
In youth and adulthood alike, drinking colored everything. After his father’s death, his delinquent habits worsened. His mother had endless patience but no answers. She appealed to her daughters, his sisters—the first of many women in his life to offer Ray a safety net.
Early in 1928, the sixteen-year-old was sent to live with Ruth and her husband in Chicago (the “Near North Side” of Chicago, where Gloria Grahame’s character in In a Lonely Place claims she logged time as a Fuller Brush Girl). It may not have been the first time he was pulled from school in La Crosse. “I got kicked out of high school seventeen times,” the director liked to brag. “I’d been a member of a youth gang,” he boasted on another occasion, “the president of an illegal fraternity in high school.” He was surely exaggerating, but the details in his most personal film, Rebel Without a Cause, suggest a familiarity with stolen cars and sympathetic police, and he did vanish to Chicago more than once as a young man.
Ruth Kienzle—“the most sophisticated” of his three sisters, according to Bernard Eisenschitz in his admirable and admiring book Nicholas Ray: An American Journey—had fanned her brother’s earliest interest in show business, taking Ray to stage shows and his first motion pictures. The very first was D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, playing at a Main Street theater in late 1915, when “Junior” was just four years old.
As a teenager Ruth was enamored of show business and thought about becoming an actress until her father tamped down her dreams. Now employed by the society fixture Edith Rockefeller McCormick—daughter of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller and divorced wife of International Harvester executive Harold F. McCormick—Ruth “released some of her frustrations by continuing to guide me to concerts, theatres, and nightclubs in Chicago during the Capone years,” Ray recalled. The director would revisit this boisterous era in Party Girl, the semimusical gangster picture he made for MGM in 1958.
In Chicago, the wayward youth was enrolled at Waller High School,* and under his watchful sister’s care his behavior improved enough that he was allowed to return to La Crosse Central High School halfway through his senior year. His habit of shuttling back and forth between Chicago and La Crosse was well-known enough that the school paper joked about it on February 5, 1929, reporting that “Ray Kienzle becomes a student again.”
Ray Kienzle’s name came up often in the high school paper and yearbook, often in the context of jokes, but always fond ones. He was well liked, popular with both peers and his teachers, who shook their heads bemusedly over his failings. He was a little like the teacher’s pet in Bigger Than Life, who looks stumped when asked to name the
Great Lakes but is trusted by James Mason to preside over the class when the teacher steps away.
Kienzle already had the reputation of a pleasure-seeking spendthrift. (Maynard L: “I spent ten dollars on a canary last week.” Ray K: “That’s nothing, I spent fifty dollars on a lark last night.”) He was good-humored and self-deprecating, especially about his grades. (“I got an A- - once—in slumber,” he wrote under his class picture in the yearbook.)
Kienzle played some football and basketball as an underclassman, but his athleticism was a bit of a ruse, like James Mason’s in Bigger Than Life. (Boasting of his own high-school pigskin triumphs—“third-string sub to hero in twenty seconds!”—Mason’s character puts his young son through intense football drills, until his life spirals out of control and his glory days are revealed as delusions.) For Ray, sports and machismo were more a means to kinship; and by senior year he was a cheerleader on the pep squad.
By then, his real interest had shifted to the debate team. Public Speaking was his new favorite class, and he followed his sister Helen in taking private lessons from local elocutionist Winona Hauser, who also helped direct stage plays at La Crosse Teachers College. Kienzle blossomed under Hauser’s tutelage, his oratory showing flair and promise. Her brother had “a very nice speaking voice,” according to Helen, “well-modulated.”
More important, by senior year Kienzle had gravitated to the Falstaff Club, which mounted the high school plays. Most if not all of his Falstaff tenure was spent backstage; his name appears on none of the published cast lists. Yet Kienzle found allies in fellow students like Mrs. Hauser’s son Alonzo, a budding sculptor, and Russell Huber, an older boy who exhorted Kienzle to try anything. Such kindred spirits must have been all the more welcome to a brooding young man living alone with his mother.
One feature of La Crosse’s bustling local arts scene was the Guy and Eloda Beach Stock Company, which usually threw down stakes in the river city during the holiday season, offering a range of familiar plays and variety shows at the Majestic Theater downtown. Eloda, a diminutive, bubbly redhead, and her husband, Guy, an all-purpose lead who also directed the shows, lived part of the year in the city—they were “famous in La Crosse,” as people liked to say—but they toured the Midwest tirelessly for ten years after the First World War.
The Beaches’ weekend matinees drew farm families from miles around, and they often recruited townies as supernumeraries. Guy Beach had a theatrical personality and served as an example of professionalism and versatility to any number of young actors who got their start with him. Kienzle soon became Guy Beach’s number one fan. He hung around behind the curtain and memorized his first lines for crowd scenes in Beach Stock Company plays.
The theater wasn’t Kienzle’s only interest. By the late 1920s, radio broadcasting was catching fire across America, and La Crosse Central High launched radio classes as part of its speech curriculum. In conjunction with Herbert Hoover’s inaugural address in the first week of March 1929, which was aired at the school on specially installed auditorium speakers, the local radio station, WKBH, announced a contest for aspiring radio hosts. The contest was sponsored by Tri-State, an ice cream company servicing Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
Members of the school’s senior class were invited to compete for the title of best emcee for a musical radio program. In the elimination trials, which went on for months at the station’s headquarters in the magnificent Stoddard Hotel downtown, contestants took full charge of the mike. They were judged for their “promptness and snappiness” as well as “inflection, tone, volume and articulation” and “interpretation or description of music and artists.” “The quality of [their] picture words” was essential, according to press accounts, but so was “that indefinite necessity, ‘air personality,’ a quality akin to the well-known ‘it.’ ” Eventually the field was narrowed to five finalists, all of whom received private coaching from the head of the high school speech department before the last round.
One of those five finalists was Kienzle. By now he was impressively tall like his father, gangly but handsome, with piercing pale blue eyes and wavy dark blond hair like his mother. Thanks to the guidance of his sisters and mother, the camaraderie of the debate team and Falstaff Club, and the guiding influences of Winona Hauser and Guy Beach, in just months he had transformed himself from a drink-addled miscreant to a polished, confident radio host. To his sweet personality the seventeen-year-old had added a distinct theatrical veneer—an “on-air personality,” as it were.
Sure enough, when the results came in that July, Ray Kienzle was the last host standing. Ray often boasted about winning the contest in later interviews, recalling that it garnered him a scholarship to “any university in the world.” The La Crosse newspaper published Kienzle’s yearbook photograph, with the victor sporting a suit and tie and a toothy grin. His radio training would be good practice for his future Hollywood profession, which would demand the same take-charge personality, imagination, and gift for translating words into pictures.
In 1958, in his first interview with the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, Ray said he was “absolutely incapable” of recalling exactly why he was drawn so early to a life in the theater. “Did it come from a feeling of revolt, from a particular pressing influence, from a need to attract attention, or from something else? I don’t know . . .”
It certainly wasn’t the lure of college. Regardless of the prize he’d won, Ray’s abysmal high school grades left him with few options for higher education. It wasn’t just the suspensions and absences—it took real lassitude to graduate 152nd out of 153 students in the La Crosse Central class of 1929. Ray did draw good grades in his preferred subjects—English, salesmanship, and public speaking—but he flunked Latin, physics, and geometry. Indeed, the La Crosse newspaper listed him as a “night school graduate.”
Ray found a temporary solution in a public institution just a short bicycle ride away from his home. La Crosse State Teachers College was a onetime “normal school” primarily dedicated to training teachers.* As a teachers college it had a limited curriculum, offered no graduate programs or professional coursework, and had few doctorates among its faculty. Yet the school had a forceful new president, George Snodgrass, and under his leadership it was making strides toward becoming a fully accredited liberal arts college and had just begun issuing four-year degrees.
Despite its fledgling academic standing, there was no social stigma attached to Teachers College. To the contrary, it was customary for La Crosse high school graduates to matriculate there while saving up for—or awaiting admission to—more exclusive colleges, particularly the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The new freshman class of 1929 included Ray Kienzle as well as his friends Robert Fries and Clarence Sezezechowski, both former Central High School debaters and Falstaffians. Indeed, Kienzle’s debate and drama clique swept the campus in the fall of 1929; soon he and his friends had taken over the Buskin Club, the elite stage society, and the Racquet, the student newspaper.
In those days drama was considered essential to teacher training, and Teachers College had an exceptional speech department, which, besides producing established plays and original works by students, hosted professional touring troupes and noteworthy guest lecturers.
The Buskin Club presented one-acts at each of its meetings, mounted ambitious all-campus shows, and performed playlets in neighboring towns. The Buskineers also spearheaded campus-wide social activities, hosting the semiformal annual Buskin Hop in the ballroom of the Stoddard Hotel. “The social event of the year,” recalled Ferdinand Sontag, a classmate of Ray’s at both La Crosse Central and Teachers College.
New Buskin Club aspirants had to survive an audition. Now growing into a handsome young man with a cultivated voice, Kienzle made an impression at the fall meeting and was quickly voted in. It didn’t hurt that other new members included Fries, Sezezechowski, and Sontag, all pals or acquaintances, along with Kathryn Snodgrass, probably Ray’s first true girlfriend. Later in life
Ray would gravitate toward many smart, beautiful women in the spotlight—Judy Holliday, Shelley Winters, Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford, Jayne Mansfield, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and more. The bright, witty, bobbed-haired Kay Snodgrass, the daughter of the Teachers College president and therefore herself “famous in La Crosse,” might be considered the first.
Although Kienzle started out backstage (initially as the club’s advertising manager), he made a splash in his second semester as coauthor, with Snodgrass, of an “original musical comedy revue” called February Flurries. Interestingly, the revue was a “take-off on all-singing, dancing, talking pictures” following the misadventures of a college student who decides to seek his fortune in Hollywood. February Flurries featured skits, songs, dances, even “Eccentric Clogging.” Both writers played leads, with Kienzle also serving as the master of ceremonies—not unlike the job of a radio announcer, or a movie director.
The staging of February Flurries, guided by Professor D. O. Coates with the help of Winona Hauser, proved a milestone for Ray, cementing his local profile. The Racquet, the school’s student weekly, held nothing back, describing the revue as “one of the greatest achievements” in the college’s history of stage productions. To mark the show’s opening, the paper spread photographs of Ray and Snodgrass across the front page—and later dropped gossip-column-style hints about their love life, noting sightings of “Ray and Kay” cozily driving around town in her Studebaker.
As his high school grades in salesmanship attest, Ray had an early knack for self-promotion, but publicity in the Racquet wasn’t hard to generate—especially considering that Kay Snodgrass served as the paper’s features editor. By February, Ray himself had been installed as sports editor, often writing unbylined accounts of diverse athletic events. Soon Robert Fries became the paper’s editor in chief and Clarence Sezezechowski—who changed his unwieldy last name to the better byline of “Hiskey”—joined them as a staff artist and all-purpose reporter.
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