Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  Ray never said whether this was his first sexual contact with a man, and his language in telling the story (“I knew the approach . . .”) suggests that it wasn’t. Even as a young man, a sports cheerleader with a macho swagger, Ray was confused by his own sexuality. “I didn’t know whether I wanted to be a homosexual or not,” he reflected years later. “Homosexual was not in my vocabulary. Did I love and revere men more than women? I think I did.”

  But in these early years he hid any attraction to men, and throughout his life he wore his womanizing as a badge of honor. He would conduct highly public romances with women and guard his homosexual or bisexual side for decades, until he was all but washed up as a Hollywood director. Even then, Ray was capable of being coy or unforthcoming. Once, for example, he was asked publicly about the bisexual motifs in Rebel Without a Cause. “I’m not sure whether you mean the bisexuality of Jim, or the bisexuality of Sal [Mineo], or the bisexuality of myself,” he answered. “I am not bisexual, but anyone who denies having a fantasy or a daydream denies having eaten a bowl of mashed potatoes.”

  However he privately defined his divided sexuality, Ray recognized that it informed his art in beneficial ways. As Ray mused years later, “That specific situation [in Chicago] brought to light an attitude in myself not consistent with the social denigration of homosexuals in those days. Later that attitude became very helpful to me in understanding and directing some of the actors with whom I’ve worked. I believe that I have been or would be successful in exposing the feminine in the roughest male symbol the public could accept. I always suspect the warmth or tenderness or color range of a person who publicly disports himself in either too strict a feminine or too strict a masculine role.”

  Father-son-lover formulas would haunt Ray’s life. But whatever effect O’Hara’s overtures had on Ray was short-term. His first semester at the University of Chicago would also be his last. Whether the cause was tensions over his relationship with O’Hara or Ray’s continued drinking and poor grades, the newly transferred freshman lasted only one term before returning to La Crosse at Christmas.

  Not that Ray Kienzle returned with his tail between his legs. Rather, he took a bold step that evidenced his growing ambitions. In early January 1932, he announced the formation of a citywide dramatic organization called the La Crosse Little Theatre Group. Although Kienzle did not immediately reenroll in Teachers College, most of his new group’s members were stalwarts from the Buskin Club, including Ferdinand Sontag as business manager and Clarence Hiskey as backstage utility man. Russell Huber, now a University of Chicago graduate, ran workshops for the group, and Teachers College speech professor Helen Dyson agreed to direct some of the plays.

  The group’s high-minded values were Kienzle’s—including its insistence on artistic purity, which became a hallmark of Nicholas Ray’s career. The Little Theatre Group’s productions would be in “no way commercial,” according to the official announcement of its formation in the Tribune and Leader-Press. “It is a purely amateur group, whose purpose is to develop the dramatic talent of its members for the enjoyment of the members themselves.”

  The group’s premiere offering was a night of one-acts that drew heavily on Ray’s semester at the University of Chicago. Professor Dyson directed an A. A. Milne playlet, while Kienzle promoted himself from Stage Manager to actual director of only the second-ever staging of Thornton Wilder’s The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden. The twenty-year-old Ray Kienzle had “studied with Thornton Wilder” and “secured the author’s permission,” reported a La Crosse newspaper. Wilder’s permission was granted for one performance only, in the Teachers College auditorium, to a nonpaying audience limited to Little Theatre Group membership—plus local reviewers, of course.

  The play’s free-form structure depended “entirely on the ability of the actors to carry the audience with them,” the critic for the La Crosse paper noted. But Ray was already demonstrating his gift for guiding players with whom he felt an affinity. The local drama critics applauded the performances under his direction, including Huber’s work as Stage Manager, the role Kienzle had originated in Chicago. (Wilder’s script was tweaked to suggest that the family’s automobile had come from “the Huber-Kienzle factory.”) “Thoroughly satisfying entertainment,” pronounced one La Crosse reviewer, “a distinct success.”

  Professor Dyson, who directed the other half of the bill, was a darling of the college community and another mentor to Kienzle. She had been directing plays in La Crosse since the mid-1920s, often playing the leads in her own productions. A lifelong spinster, Dyson was old enough to be Ray’s mother; he and she were inseparable during the Little Theatre Group days.

  The first half of 1932 was a busy time for Kienzle and his Little Theatre Group. He acted in or directed several workshop productions, including Edna St. Vincent Millay’s dark, absurdist antiwar play Aria da Capo. He led a troupe of friends to a regional Little Theatre tournament in Winona, Minnesota, where he tied for first place in acting honors. And finally, in late April, Kienzle starred in and directed the organization’s first major production: Noël Coward’s Hay Fever, presented on the stage at Lincoln Junior High School. Reviewers praised Ray’s sly performance as the ill-mannered, ultra-bohemian Simon—“a ticklish part, wavering as it does between super-adolescence and epigrammatical sophistication,” as the La Crosse Tribune and Leader-Press observed.

  The Little Theatre Group was so successful the company offered a return engagement of Wilder’s The Happy Journey and Millay’s Aria da Capo in June. Then, over the summer of 1932, the group branched into children’s theater. With his reputation now soaring in La Crosse cultural circles, Ray opened a “private school in drama,” teaching students aged seven to fifteen at his mother’s house on West Avenue North, where he still lived. Ray presided over a six-week curriculum of morning classes in “pantomime, poise development, corrective and development speech, all to be done in recreational fashion,” according to one newspaper account.

  His Chicago acquaintance Harold Stark, who was gathering material for a lecture tour, came to visit during the summer. Their friendship deepened as Ray briefly traveled along on Stark’s expedition, photographing mansions high above the river towns along the Mississippi evincing the “Steamboat Gothic” style of the pre–Civil War era.

  The crowning glory of that summer of 1932—the last Ray would spend in La Crosse—was the city’s Washington Bicentennial Pageant, a three-day festival held in conjunction with July Fourth festivities. La Crosse loved a parade, and the annual parade of parades was this procession winding through downtown streets featuring hundreds of singers and dancers, marching bands and bugle corps, costumed historical characters, floats, flag bearers, and the reigning Miss La Crosse. And leading all the marchers that year was the recent college dropout Ray Kienzle Jr., appearing in costume as “young George Washington.” It was a scene that epitomized the all-American side of Ray’s boyhood—and doubtless furnished inspiration for the memorable July Fourth sequences in Wind Across the Everglades, a film Ray would make a quarter-century later.

  The year that Ray Kienzle pranced down the streets of La Crosse as George Washington, carrying an American flag, was probably also the year he and Clarence Hiskey tried their darndest to form a youth chapter of the U.S. Communist Party.

  Economic conditions had been deteriorating in the United States since the late 1920s, and Kienzle came back from Chicago fired with a desire to change the oppressive capitalist system. The University of Chicago was teeming with left-wing ferment: In the academic year 1931–32 alone, speakers there included Jane Addams, the Hull House founder and social crusader, and Ben Reitman, anarchist and physician to the poor (as well as Emma Goldman’s lover).

  La Crosse was hardly a revolutionary breeding ground, however, and Kienzle hadn’t yet found a way to connect his artistic goals with his deepening social conscience. After mornings spent teaching theater to children, he and Clarence Hiskey and Robert Fries convened evening meetings at the Ki
enzle residence to agitate for the betterment of society. By now Kienzle was listing the home’s side entrance as his address, yet his mother frequently opened the door to welcome his guests, a warm and pleasant hostess to child performers and incipient Communists alike.

  The meetings were open to all, and Ferdinand Sontag and another Teachers College acquaintance, both of them virulent anti-Communists, attended the meetings to counter the arguments of their left-leaning classmates.

  At “the first Communist meeting,” Sontag reminisced, “there were some projects that were discussed. There was a little guy, who had a grease pot sandwich shop on Sixth and Main Street, and he wasn’t paying his waitresses enough and he was scum. He was what the Russians called the bourgeois. Those terms were freely bandied about. We were going to run a strike on him according to Mr. Kienzle—this little restaurant operator.”

  The strike plan must have fizzled—there is no record of it in La Crosse newspapers—but the true believers kept up their efforts. In early October, Kienzle and his ragtag cadre convened at the La Crosse Union Hall to hear an address by James W. Ford, a candidate for vice president on the Communist Party USA ticket in the upcoming national elections. The college Communists cheered Ford’s speech and shook his hand; then, because Ford was African American—“colored,” in the terminology of the day—and no La Crosse hotel would admit him, he was invited to bunk at the Kienzle home.

  This couldn’t have escaped the notice of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, who followed high functionaries of the U.S. Communist Party around America, jotting down the names of all their local contacts and conspirators. In the case of La Crosse they must have gotten at least two names: Clarence Hiskey and Ray Kienzle.

  In the fall of 1932, Ray Kienzle was back in classes at Teachers College, back with a new column in the Racquet, back playing lead roles in plays for the Buskin Club.

  His hair was long now, his wardrobe all black and bohemian. Already a campus legend for his night-owl lifestyle (“I have been known to like a party,” he averred in the Racquet), Kienzle was still not wooing any girl in particular. He was playing the field, he informed readers, “apparently free of amorous entanglements.”

  The Racquet had a new editor, not one of the old Central High gang, and Kienzle may have had to soft-pedal the politics in his revamped column, now titled “Bazaar Bizarre” and bylined “r.n.k.” in the style of e. e. cummings. “Bazaar Bizarre” was just as likely to quote Masefield, the English poet laureate, as Marx.

  As usual, however, “r.n.k.” wrote as though he was conducting an internal debate with himself, like one of the characters in his films who stared into mirrors, as though waiting for the image to reply. When homecoming came around, “r.n.k.” used the column to wonder aloud whether the annual celebration, which once had compelled his interest, was now too trivial a subject for a socially conscious, artistic young man who hoped “ to strive toward a bit of originality, or at least individualism” in his column.

  Yielding to temptation, “r.n.k.” went ahead and wrote about homecoming, but with a nostalgic air, recalling friends and sports heroes who no longer graced the campus. His college days were winding down, he sensed, and he knew he was marking time. “I am lost in reminiscences of affairs, love and otherwise, but love mostly, and of the Stoddard and of the Blue Moon, along with dens of iniquity,” he mused in the column. “It’s reactionary to be talking and thinking like this, but if you don’t mind I’ll allow myself.”

  Fretting aloud about the “prostitution of art” in a play he’d traveled all the way to Milwaukee to see—only to be disappointed by—Kienzle seemed more troubled by the possibility that he was selling out his own artistic ideals by prolonging his adolescence in La Crosse. Consulting a dictionary, he defined “prostitution of art” for his readers as “an act of setting oneself to sale, or of devoting to base or unworthy purposes what is in one’s power; as the prostitution of abilities.”

  That December Kienzle took one last curtain call for the Buskin Club, portraying the weak-willed Reverend James Morrell opposite Professor Dyson as the eponymous “modern woman” of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. The Racquet praised his local swan song as “perfection,” adding, “His role was a difficult one but Kienzle lived up to his reputation as a first-class actor.”

  No longer was this canned tribute from cronies at the Racquet. Even Ferdinand Sontag, who had personal as well as political reservations about Kienzle (finding his classmate self-involved, “an overly-fond-of-himself individual”), thought his contemporary outclassed everyone else on the La Crosse theater scene. “I knew what he was doing as far as acting, and his acting ability in my book was good,” recalled Sontag, who at the time was president of the Buskin Club.

  Since the delinquency of his high school days, he had evolved into a young man brimming with intelligence and positive purpose. He had scaled the heights of local accomplishment, developing a charismatic, even flamboyant personality to match his strapping good looks. Long before Nicholas Ray had achieved worldwide fame as a motion picture director, he was “famous in La Crosse.” But for now Ray Kienzle had outgrown his hometown.

  Finally, at the end of the semester, Ray bid adieu to the Buskin Club and Teachers College. Friends and classmates saw him as “a really unusual character,” in Sontag’s words, “not sure of which direction he was going, but he was going some place.”

  Restless energy always fueled Ray’s angst, and it didn’t often point in any clear direction. In the months that followed, he explored his nearby options: He went to Minneapolis to visit friends and see art exhibits, to Madison for college events and parties, to Milwaukee for important plays, to Chicago to catch up with Harold Stark and Professor O’Hara and Thornton Wilder.

  Kienzle was conflicted about his ambitions: Should he try for a career as a stage actor or director? Did radio offer the best possibilities? Perhaps he should strive to become a writer?

  He talked it over with people. Everyone in Chicago was buzzing about Frank Lloyd Wright, who in October 1932 had launched an experiment in communal living, learning, and arts appreciation at his Taliesin home in Spring Green, Wisconsin, about ninety miles southeast of La Crosse. The experiment was called the Taliesin Fellowship, and young people were flocking to the architect’s compound there, eager to study architecture and the arts at the master’s feet.

  Inez Cunningham knew the world-famous architect; so did Harold Stark, who had arranged a lecture by the architect at the Minneapolis Art Institute when on the staff there. Professor O’Hara and Thornton Wilder also knew the Wisconsin architect. Wilder wasn’t alone in urging Kienzle to consider joining the Fellowship, but the playwright carried the most prestige with Kienzle—and with Frank Lloyd Wright. Wilder offered to speak to the architect on Kienzle’s behalf.

  The prospect intrigued Ray. His father had been a mere builder; perhaps his son would go him one better and carve a name for himself in the world of design and architecture.

  For the time being, however, Ray Kienzle found himself stuck in La Crosse. He reenlisted with the Little Theatre in January 1933, taking on a few small acting roles and helping Russell Huber with his workshops while biding time and awaiting word from Wilder.

  Nineteen thirty-three was a ghost year for Ray Kienzle, a time of false starts and soul-searching. Sometime early that year, he took a cue from Clarence Hiskey, née Sezezechowski, and changed his name to something with billboard flair: He began signing his letters “Nicholas Ray.”

  A short time later, Thornton Wilder performed his good turn and the newly christened Nick Ray went to meet Frank Lloyd Wright in Spring Green. The young man from La Crosse was transfixed by the renowned architect, who, in his sixties, was at the height of his reputation, and who, in person—flowing white hair, black hat and cape—was every bit the self-conscious artiste Wilder was not.

  Wright greeted the young man in courtly, fatherly fashion, introducing him to his young wife, Olgivanna, and escorting him around the grounds of
Taliesin, where his growing family of followers were engaged in frenetic activity. The architect painted Taliesin as a budding temple of the arts, where writers, poets, dancers, and artists would mingle and cross-fertilize their ideas and talents. When Ray arrived, the members of the Fellowship, known as apprentices, were constructing a playhouse for stage shows and motion picture screenings.

  Wright may have been at the peak of his fame, but financially he was scraping the bottom. He had devised the Fellowship at least in part to bring in the extra revenue he desperately needed to pay his debts and back taxes. Every honored member of the Fellowship was dunned an annual tuition of six hundred dollars for room and board and drawing materials, to be paid in advance or earned through physical labor. Wright was inflexible about the tuition payment. As Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman recount in The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, references were all well and good, but not even skilled draftsmanship would guarantee entrée. “Those with the money were, for the most part, encouraged to come,” the authors wrote.

  “I can’t draw a straight line with a T square or a triangle,” Ray confessed years later. “I could not carve a square block out of sandstone.” With his background in stagecraft, however, Ray seemed just the man to oversee the stage shows in Taliesin’s planned playhouse. Wright warmed to the idea, mentioning the American poet Richard Hovey’s lyric masterpiece Taliesin: A Masque, which celebrated the Welsh druid-bard for whom Wright had named his family estate. Hovey’s dramatic poem might offer an evening’s diversion for the Fellowship, Wright suggested, though it would require clever adaptation. Ray promised to look into it.

  Ray yearned to join Wright’s family of apprentices, but the architect was vague about his timetable, and the young man from La Crosse didn’t have the six hundred dollars—a fortune to him. Summer rolled around, and Ray still didn’t have the money, so he struck out for New York. Harold Stark had moved there ahead of him, living in New York hotel rooms while writing art criticism and giving talks on the radio; another friend, Ray’s La Crosse buddy Alonzo Hauser, was living in Greenwich Village. Professor Dyson, who had studied at Columbia University, rhapsodized about the city that never slept, the nerve center of American theater—and a hotbed of leftist fervor. In the bitter depths of the Depression, the plays and shows produced in New York were increasingly tinged red.