In April 1930 the Racquet carried another front-page photo of Ray Kienzle, this time trumpeting his lead in The New Poor, a three-act comedy that was the main Buskin production of the year. Kienzle played the Grand Duke, a role his friend Russell Huber had played in their high school. Huber drove up from Chicago for opening night weekend. While in La Crosse, he talked up the University of Chicago, where he was a theater major. Huber was especially enthusiastic about the English class taught by Thornton Wilder, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1928 for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
Wilder had impressed Ray when the author, a native of Madison, Wisconsin, spoke at Teachers College earlier in the semester. Wilder delivered a riveting address to a packed audience, proclaiming that literature should reflect “a true expression of life,” a credo that seemed to capture the spirit of hard times after the Wall Street crash and the onset of the Great Depression. Wilder’s “brilliant and ingenious” language dazzled the college crowd, according to a Racquet account, and the La Crosse students realized “they had for a brief time met a person to whom the term materialistic American could not apply.” After the lecture, Ray made a point of shaking Wilder’s hand.
Wilder wasn’t the University of Chicago’s only attraction. The school’s innovative new president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, had taken office in 1929 as a champion of great books and ideas. Kienzle hadn’t read many great books yet, but working for the Racquet got him into the lifelong habit of reading newspapers—clipping items of interest—and both the Racquet and the La Crosse Tribune and Leader-Press covered the educator’s every bold move.
Kienzle told Huber he was determined to join him in Chicago.
All of La Crosse rushed outside gratefully to greet the summer, which was inevitably short, hot, muggy, and bug infested, but studded with parades, festivals, traveling circuses, and Wild West shows. A lifelong music lover, Nicholas Ray never forgot the revelation of hearing “The Dardanella Blues” played on a summer night down at the waterfront by a band featuring pianist Lil Hardin and her husband, trumpeter Louis Armstrong.
It must have been during the summer of 1930 that Kienzle made a little pocket money traveling with stunt fliers, according to later movie-studio publicity.
The college itself was quiet and dark in the summer. Summertime was slow and the living was lazy in La Crosse; the river sometimes overflowed its banks, raising a stench in the area. Storms raged and the sun blazed, sometimes in the same day. Kienzle, Kay Snodgrass, and friends haunted the downtown ice cream and sweet shops, making one cherry phosphate last for hours. They cruised the city in Snodgrass’s Studebaker, lollygagging in the city’s beautiful manicured parks.
Some days the only thing to do was climb “Ole Granddad,” a landmark steep cliff rising six hundred feet above the downtown—like the one that gives a scared boy his last refuge in On Dangerous Ground, or the “big high bluff” where the chickie run proves fatal in Rebel Without a Cause. Climbing Ole Granddad was a cherished pastime in La Crosse; there you could stare across the Mississippi, following the roads that twisted west, or lie on your back with a girl, trying to pick out the stars and constellations.
“I was just thinking,” James Dean says to Sal Mineo as they stargaze at the planetarium in Rebel Without a Cause, “that once you’ve been up there, you’ve been someplace.”
Ray Kienzle was nineteen years old, but he hadn’t been much of anywhere, not yet. He would stay in La Crosse another year, mostly dodging education but staying productive in radio and theater.
Although his scholarship to “any university in the world” may have expired, the problems keeping him from transferring to the University of Chicago weren’t really financial. Weak grades and his aversion to the classroom prompted Kienzle to skip the fall 1930 semester at Teachers College. Instead he helped out behind the scenes on Buskin Club projects and took the lead in organizing a college hour of playlets performed on Thursday mornings on WKBH.
Then, still not ready for Chicago, he returned to Teachers College for the spring semester of 1931. He came roaring back to the campus, stepping in for Kay Snodgrass (by then the two had broken up, and Kay had transferred to the University of Wisconsin in Madison) as a features editor at the Racquet. He also became the unchallenged leading light of the Buskin Club shows, on- and offstage.
By now Ray was a self-styled artiste, affecting a costume of flowing coats—and even a cape—that reflected his expanding horizons. Once a reluctant reader, now he devoured challenging poetry and plowed through political tracts. The college sophomore was undergoing a process of radicalization; living at home, he had no money for luxuries and decided he didn’t need them. Like Thornton Wilder, Kienzle didn’t intend to become a “materialistic American.”
As the unemployment and poverty of the Depression spread, hobos and jobless drifters began popping up all over the country. La Crosse’s homeless population was burgeoning. Troubles abroad made headlines in the city newspapers Ray Kienzle devoured. And although black people were scarce in La Crosse, reports of race crime and injustice were a fixture in the news.
None of this was lost on Ray Kienzle or his peers at the Racquet. By the spring of 1931 Ray was contributing a new column called “The Bull-shevist”—a pun on “The Bolshevist”—under the byline “R.N.K.” His writing style was stream-of-consciousness, with the dashed-off feeling of a diary—an intimate voice that would become a trademark of his writing. “The Bull-shevist” offered gossip, humor, musings, and one-liners about campus events and activities. While much of it was written in a kind of code that would have been clear to students in the know, at times it was rambling, even incomprehensible.
“Thoughts while in Bath,” “R.N.K.” scribbled on one occasion. “Among those present. O salt of the earth. A doll buggy is disturbing. Fights are interesting if only for the melodramatic reconciliations. Would like to see a ten-round Frazee-Sanders go. Cashman has an entirely tough role for tonight.* Confident that this lad won’t hand us so much ad libing [sic] we have a pleasant enemy ahead of us. Then the Buskin to-do. Water doesn’t take on silver nitrate. Neither does soap . . .”
For the first time in his published writing, which until now had focused narrowly on campus sports, Ray was giving rein to left-wing sentiments. In one column, he heaped scorn on the “voting intelligence” of the city electorate, deriding “our newly installed mayor [who has] declared himself in favor of beer.” In another, he chided the Tribune and Leader-Press for an editorial about student misconduct, declaring that the paper ought to “harp more on the environment,” which he felt was more responsible for encouraging negative behavior and attitudes than harmless student hijinks. “A paper should be more concerned with the welfare of the city and its citizens,” he declared. But at nineteen Ray was hardly an ideologue; he also poked fun at doctrinaire-ism—at all -isms, for that matter. (“The distribution of will-power, and not wealth, should be contested by socialists and communists,” he wrote.)
Politics did not consume his energies. He spent most of his spring term busying himself with his weekly morning radio show and Buskin Club playlets (even, one night, mounting a one-act play in French). He still led school cheers at bonfires and pep rallies and could be spotted at every major college sporting event, often writing up the games afterward. A regular Big Man On Campus was he.
Though Ray was seen with an endless number of girlfriends after Kay Snodgrass’s departure, he assured the readers of “The Bull-shevist” that none of them was “special.” Then as ever, he tended to turn romances—and even friendships—into endurance tests. He didn’t sleep well, and his restlessness came alive especially at night. He hated to be alone; instead he stayed out all night, dancing, drinking, and playing cards, taking pride in stumbling home at dawn.
“You think the end of the world will come at night time?” Sal Mineo asks at the end of Rebel Without a Cause, just before he is gunned down.
“Uh-uh,” James Dean replies. “At dawn.”
The summer of 1931
stretched ahead. This must have been the summer Kienzle traveled to the West Coast—“my first hitch-hike to California”—to visit his oldest sister, Alice, and her husband. Later studio publicity claimed that he tried “his luck as an extra” in Hollywood on this trip; more plausibly, he recalled spotting one of his literary idols on the beach: Robinson Jeffers, a poet whose preference for the divine (over the solipsistic ways of man) appealed to Ray’s own idealism.
He had left for California uncertain whether his dreams of transferring to Chicago would ever be realized. His grades were perpetually feeble; he was always retaking French I, for instance, never quite satisfying the requirements. (Though he liked French—even dropping a phrase or two into Rebel Without a Cause—years later he cheerfully confessed to a group of Parisian cinephiles that his command of the language was negligible.)
Yet he had worked hard at improving his overall academic performance, and finally it paid off. When he returned from California, an admission letter from the University of Chicago was waiting for him.
Chapter Two
“Struggle Is Grand”
1931–1934
Founded in 1890 by John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago was one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges, set like a gem in Hyde Park and dominated by English Gothic buildings replete with towers, cloisters, and gargoyles. Its rarefied intellectual atmosphere and research programs guaranteed a steady yield of Nobel laureates—while the pulsing nightlife of Chicago was an equally powerful attraction for undergraduates.
After two halting years at La Crosse, Kienzle entered the prestigious private university in the fall of 1931 classified as a transfer freshman with “advanced standing”—meaning that some, but not all, of his La Crosse courses were accredited. His first-semester curriculum included old standbys like elementary French and public speaking, as well as a course called The Plays of Shakespeare.
Russell Huber was already gone, having finished his studies and returned to La Crosse. But Thornton Wilder remembered Ray and was expecting him. The transfer freshman was not eligible for the advanced course Wilder was teaching, Greek and Roman Masterpieces. But Wilder’s lectures were open to all, and the famous professor lived in a student dormitory, where, he sometimes grumbled, students freely interrupted him and his writing regimen.
Professorial in appearance and personality, Wilder was “a tall man [ . . . ] without the grace some tall men have,” recalled director Elia Kazan, who later worked closely with the playwright while staging The Skin of Our Teeth on Broadway, “unnaturally thin, rickety, his complexion a washroom green.” To Ray Kienzle, however, Wilder was a golden exemplar of the writer’s life.
By his own account, Kienzle was an apt pupil more of life than of coursework, which he habitually shirked. He recalled pledging to a fraternity within two weeks of arrival and playing football on a team of Greeks. Women then as ever were one of his priorities. “I was continually standing on the tip of my stiff prick and therefore wanted, as in the old Jewish curse, to go from bed to bed to room to room in every girls’ dormitory,” he said. Drinking was another. “I took along [to Chicago] two gallon tins of undiluted grain alcohol,” he boasted.
More constructively, Kienzle joined the Student Dramatic Association. His soulful personality, combined with his magnetic physical presence, quickly won over the faculty adviser, a drama professor named Frank Hurburt O’Hara. Kienzle’s initial triumph was surviving an open tryout of one hundred of his peers for the first major show of the season: A. A. Milne’s three-act comedy To Meet the Prince. He secured the smallest of eleven parts, delivering a few lines as the prince’s secretary during the show’s brief November run.
The second Student Dramatic Association production in December was more propitious, for it augured the world premiere of three one-act plays by Wilder himself. The Long Christmas Dinner, Queens of France, and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden were rehearsed for twice as long as the usual student production, with the playwright himself monitoring the auditions and run-throughs and attending every performance at the Reynolds Club.
With Wilder’s blessing, Kienzle landed the pivotal role of the Stage Manager in The Happy Journey, a character anticipating a similar one in Our Town, the play for which Wilder would earn a second Pulitzer Prize later in the decade. (The role was so important to Our Town that Wilder himself stepped into the part for two weeks during the play’s initial Broadway run.) The Stage Manager was a sort of a radio host or master of ceremonies; in The Happy Journey, he introduced the characters, acted bits, and smoothed transitions in Wilder’s loosely structured portrait of an average American family on an automobile excursion.
Besides the acting experience it gave him, The Happy Journey gave Kienzle an opportunity to watch and learn as one of America’s literary giants nursed his new work to life. Wilder advised on blocking and nuances, and even adjusted his own text during rehearsals. Ray and the other students delighted in “Wilder on stage,” as the school yearbook reported, the playwright bristling with “Wilderian gestures and gesticulations.”
Always armed with more questions than answers, Kienzle observed Wilder closely, pondering his decisions, buttonholing the playwright whenever something puzzled him. Eventually they developed a true mentor-protégé bond, with Wilder’s preference for simple, natural drama influencing Ray’s emerging artistic philosophy.
The premiere of the Wilder one-acts was the social highlight of the year at the University of Chicago. President Hutchins even bought out the entire house one night for a special performance for privileged alumni and friends. “Diamonds, emeralds, society, literati, a four night run, calls for author,” reported the university yearbook. “All time record broken for Reynolds Club audiences.”
Another inspiration to Ray, as much a father figure as a mentor—certainly he was old enough to be his father—was Frank Hurburt O’Hara, the adviser of the Student Dramatic Association and the director of the Wilder plays. A onetime promising short-story writer and newspaper drama critic, O’Hara had been a pillar of the Chicago faculty since 1924, one of the most popular professors on campus. In the 1930s, he would go on to write several distinguished histories of the theater. A tall, handsome bachelor with wavy silver hair, O’Hara supervised many extracurricular activities on campus—including the Blackfriars and the Mirror, drama groups for upperclassmen and women respectively—but freshman drama was his special charge.
Ray Kienzle spent his spare time (too much of it, by his own admission) sampling Chicago’s rowdy music clubs, dance halls, and bars. He couldn’t afford tickets to the expensive road-show plays presented in the ornate palaces of the Loop. But Professor O’Hara had orchestra seats for the prime attractions, and he befriended Kienzle, accompanying him to touring productions and sometimes bringing him along to elegant private dinner parties with Chicago’s aristocracy and marquee theatrical names sprinkled among the guests. Wilder was a regular at the theater outings and dinner parties, and so was a mutual friend of his and O’Hara’s, Inez Cunningham, a dynamic former Chicago Tribune film critic and arts editor who had married into high society. Mrs. Cunningham’s first husband had committed suicide, and now Mrs. Cunningham was being wooed by Harold Stark, a moodily handsome writer who had worked for the New York Tribune in the early 1920s and published a book of interviews with artists and celebrities such as Eugene O’Neill, Isadora Duncan, Theodore Dreiser, Nazimova, and Konstantin Stanislavski. Stark had just left a position as assistant director of the Minneapolis Art Institute and had since become an art critic and lecturer. Kienzle was drawn to his passion and intellect.
The young man from Wisconsin cultivated his lifelong knack for mingling—whether with celebrities or coal miners—at these gatherings. But Professor O’Hara’s many kindnesses “bewildered me,” Ray would recall years later. “I was not so brilliant as a young actor to warrant that kind of attention.”
Late that October, a revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy of manners The School for Scandal
was mounted at the Grand Opera House, with Ethel Barrymore, the reigning first lady of the American stage, playing Lady Teazle. One night during the run, Ray recalled—it was a favorite anecdote—Professor O’Hara presided over a private dinner in honor of Barrymore. To the delight of the guests, the great lady inveighed against George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s The Royal Family, in which the actress was satirized as a prima donna capable of missing the opening curtain.
Suddenly, after holding forth about the sacrilege, the great lady interrupted her tirade in horror to ask the time. She was about to miss her own curtain! As she rushed off to avert disaster, Ray marveled at the spectacle of it all. “How privileged, how truly in, I had been, to actually smirk at Edna Ferber in company with the truly adult,” he recalled. “A night on the heights . . .”
The Barrymore story was only the first of many diva episodes Ray would suffer in his career. But what happened next was just as memorable and privileged—as formative a Chicago experience, in its way—as apprenticing with Thornton Wilder.
After dinner, Professor O’Hara offered Kienzle a ride back to campus. “For some reason unknown to me,” the professor drove his car to the edge of the “savage black water” of Lake Michigan and parked there. “I knew the approach of a man who liked other men was about to happen,” as the director told a class in the 1970s. “He caressed me. I wanted to please him. God knows I wanted to say thank you, somehow I wanted to say thank you. I said thank you. He unbuttoned my trousers. I wanted to come if he wanted me to come. I stroked his gray-white hair. I couldn’t come. We drove back to campus.”
Nicholas Ray Page 3
