On Sunday afternoons everyone would gather enthusiastically for the weekly playhouse program. Members of the Fellowship demonstrated their specialties, but visiting artists also performed. There might be exhibits: weavings, pottery, watercolors, sculptures. Musical presentations included recitals of Schubert lieder, piano sonatas, or Rimsky-Korsakov songs for harp and voice. There were spoken-word offerings by apprentices, sometimes puppeteers or magicians. Afterward, there was cake and coffee.
The record of the playlets Ray staged at Taliesin is sparse, but besides Piranese Calico he mounted a Victorian matrimonial pantomime in February and The Minuet, a charming one-act eighteenth-century vignette, in April.
The playhouse was just as focused on cinema as on live theater, and the calendar of screenings was arguably one of America’s most sophisticated. Foreign films dominated the schedule: often they were Soviet, German, or Japanese productions; favorite artists included Sergei Eisenstein, René Clair, and Carl Dreyer. The feature films were usually preceded by a Walt Disney cartoon and newsreel or a nature short. Film esoterica was one of the prides of Taliesin, and film lovers drove from miles around to see movies unavailable in Madison or Milwaukee. (Fellowship members were rankled that Spring Green locals shied away from such fare, so they periodically hosted exemplary Hollywood films to keep them coming back.)
This was Ray’s first known exposure to cosmopolitan filmmaking outside the standard commercial mold. “The medium of the celluloid strip and the sound track is given full vent in a kind of release,” Ray rhapsodized in one of the Wisconsin newspaper accounts, “as the audience in comfort, sipping coffee and eating cakes and smoking, witnesses one of the world’s finest picture plays.”
Wright charged admission to the weekend entertainment and screenings, and by the spring of 1934 he’d begun charging for tours of the grounds as well; the tours drew visitors from far and wide, and gave Taliesin a fresh revenue stream that continues to this day.
On Sunday nights, after the hoi polloi had gone home, Taliesin hosted serious talks for the apprentices on topics ranging from American existentialism to life in twelfth-century Italy, followed by fireside drink and discussion. The honored guests ranged from celebrated figures like artist-illustrator Rockwell Kent, showing “movies taken in Greenland and talking informally of his natural philosophy,” to local professors from the University of Wisconsin. The guest lectures often leaned left, and the contemporary “Soviet experiment” in social engineering was a recurring topic on Sunday nights, with screenings of the latest Soviet films augmented by eyewitness updates from travelers recently returned from Stalin’s Russia.
Sometimes, the speaking obligation fell to Wright himself, the guru and patriarch of the Fellowship. The architect would extemporize, ranging freely, sometimes abstrusely. On one occasion, rising after a luncheon in Madison to expound on “Art and Beauty,” Wright turned to “The Nightingale” by Hans Christian Andersen, reading the fable aloud “simply and beautifully,” if at inordinate length. “The mixed audience,” reported one apprentice among the gathering, “and Fellowship apprentices were breathless. Many are still wondering, no doubt, what happened.”
Wright oversaw the weekend programming and the invitation of noteworthy guests. But Ray quickly became the master of ceremonies of Sunday afternoons. A few short weeks after joining the Fellowship, an announcement made it official: The pipe-fitting apprentice was the new director of the Taliesin playhouse.
Happy days they were for Ray, at least at first, and he was “frightfully eager to make good,” as even Wright later admitted. He soaked up the advanced intellectual discourse he had shirked in his academic life in La Crosse and Chicago. Ideas were in the air the Fellowship breathed, and whether at work in the fields or in formal group sessions one could expect the discussion to range widely, from Walt Whitman and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Spengler, Thoreau, and Marx. The apprentices took special pleasure in their knowledge of film, debating the aesthetics of German Expressionism or the editing principles of Eisenstein.
Meals at Taliesin were communal, with the apprentices rotating as cooks of the nightly feasts. On weekends there were wild parties, wild drinking, wild dancing until the wee hours. “Our way back across the fields is lighted by the moon,” wrote Ray, “or its handy and unpretentious substitute, the flashlight.” From time to time the apprentices would pile into a caravan of cars and drive to Madison to attend a university symposium, or a recital by the Indian modern dancer Uday Shankar. Sometimes they headed to Spring Green on Saturday night to take in the bars or the latest Hollywood movie at the Rex Theatre downtown.
Romances blossomed among the apprentices, and—as would be the case throughout his life—Ray’s easygoing manner and magnetic looks crossed age and class and gender. “Nick cut a handsome figure,” recalled actor Christopher Plummer, who met him later during his Hollywood career. “He was a very sensual man—attractive to both men and women.”
But not everyone found the brooding young man attractive. Henry Schubart, who roomed with Ray briefly at Taliesin, said that Ray could be “tempestuous, to say the least.” One cold winter night, after drinking too much moonshine, the two got into a fistfight in the snow, though Schubart couldn’t recall why. “He loved poetry and literature,” Schubart said, “but I always had the feeling that he was internally nihilistic, defensive, and not basically productive.”
Early on, it must have been clear to the other apprentices that Ray was a favorite of Wright’s: In one of the few columns the architect himself wrote for the local papers about the Fellowship—under a nom de plume, of course—he singled Ray out (“big fellow—looks strong”) as one apprentice who threw himself wholeheartedly into the social life of Taliesin.
Dispatches from Taliesin were not only a form of publicity but a sign of the master’s approval. Just one year earlier, “r.n.k.” had been writing a tidbits column and reporting on sports for a campus newspaper. Now, as “Nicholas Ray,” he was among the privileged few whose byline Wright approved to spread the word of Taliesin.
In Madison’s Wisconsin State Journal, Ray published a virtual manifesto on contemporary theater, headlined “Taliesin Student Calls Theater ‘Idiot Child of a Sane Yesterday.’ ” Mingling high-flown language with Wright’s native radicalism, Ray declared himself a modernist who wished to tear down the artificial barriers between performance and audience. He attacked the traditional “picture frame theater” and made a point of excoriating Madison’s beloved Bascom Hall, the main stage for University of Wisconsin dramatic productions, as a “hideous anachronism. “I wonder how an individual possibly can feel in harmony (not necessarily in moral agreement) with a 20th century play, almost by necessity a series of ‘stills,’ produced in a place that is in spirit 17th century construction. Or is it possible that the aesthetic sins of the fathers inhere also, and we have been born with layer upon layer of dead skin or hard shell over our sensitivities?
“Tradition—as a sense of continuity of past into present—is an admirable sense to possess,” Ray’s manifesto continued, “but when it goes farther than that and is personified by institutions that exist as traditions as the only valid basis, it often becomes irritating, and is, more than irritating, a positive sign of impotence.”
When that column was published, on April 2, 1934, Ray was firmly ensconced as one of the brightest, most promising of Wright’s acolytes, with the title of director of the playhouse. Within the month, however, the twenty-two-year-old would do something that alienated his benefactor.
Ray’s own memories of their falling-out varied. According to a fuzzy version of events in Bernard Eisenschitz’s book, Ray said that he had “a battle with Wright over the word ‘organize.’ ” But years later the director told a Madison, Wisconsin, college audience that the confrontation was more aesthetic than political, occurring when Wright proposed building a sandstone façade to cover “some beautiful oak panels” at Taliesin. According to Ray, he asked innocently: “Is that it, Mr. Wright? What looks org
anic is organic?” The architect reacted with such “vitriol,” according to Ray’s account in a Madison newspaper, that he was forced to depart from Spring Green the following day.
The contemporary film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ray’s steadfast admirer, related a similar version of Ray’s “falling out with Wright,” dating from the last time he saw the director socially, at a Soho bar in 1977. In an expansive mood that night, Ray gestured animatedly as he conjured the long-ago scene, involving “a fairly modest architectural suggestion or question on Ray’s part that had provoked the full wrath of the great man’s conceit,” as Rosenbaum wrote after Ray’s death. “The curious thing about this tale now, as I try to remember it, is that the actual details of the encounter remain only shadowy sketches.”
However shadowy, the breach was irreconcilable. Ray abandoned Taliesin under a cloud. “I have felt the hand of genius,” Ray is said to have written to girlfriend Jean Evans from Spring Green before hastily leaving for New York, “and it is a heavy hand.”
But was Ray’s shifting account of the breach deliberately shadowy—cloaking another mystery, another wound to his soul?
Had Wright and Ray argued about a particular program he wanted to produce, or about the overall artistic agenda of the playhouse? Had the famous architect dismissed his favorite young disciple because he couldn’t easily pigeonhole or control him? Had Ray, in some way, exposed his secret attraction to men?
According to Friedland and Zellman’s The Fellowship, Wright had a complicated, conflicted attitude toward homosexuality. The architect “cast himself as an image of American manhood” and enjoyed the “heterosexual strut” that yielded, in his case, a tangled love life with overlapping wives and mistresses. At times, though, Wright seemed unsure of his masculinity; he evinced certain “effeminate tendencies,” according to Friedland and Zellman, and may have experienced homosexual desires toward close friends without acting upon them. Through the years, Taliesin gave safe harbor to quite a few homosexuals, and gay members of the Fellowship enjoyed their share of love affairs. Yet several times, privately and publicly, the architect upbraided homosexual men as degenerate “pansies” who showed “a weakness of character, backsliding toward the primitive.”
Had Ray displayed that same weakness of character, that degenerate trait? Had he even stooped to trysting with another member of the Fellowship?
Some years later, Jean Evans interviewed Frank Lloyd Wright in her capacity as a journalist. When she mentioned her old boyfriend—by then her ex-husband—she was taken aback by the architect’s “moralistic and vindictive” rebuke of his former apprentice. Among other things, Wright denounced Ray as a homosexual.
Research for this book has shed additional light on this murky setback early in Ray’s career. To the one person to whom Wright felt he owed an explanation—Harold Stark, Ray’s affluent friend, the author and art critic who’d been making bimonthly installments on his tuition—the architect privately gave an account of the incident that precipitated Ray’s dismissal.
“There is a weakness in the lad that unfits him for the freedom of life here,” Wright wrote in a letter to Stark. “A glass of wine and he is out to town to finish up in a plain drunk. I argued the matter several times and he is a promising penitent, always.”
On the evening of April 21, Wright reported, Ray went to Spring Green with “some of the boys,” ostensibly to see the new motion picture at the Rex. “He disappeared in town without any of the boys noticing it,” wrote Wright. “About an hours [sic] later my secretary was called out to find Nick dead drunk on the street and bruised from a fight he had had with one of the local drunks. About twenty-five people were watching the whole performance with apparent amusement. There have been several occasions before where he has enacted this kind of performance, and I have repeatedly warned him.
“I have cited to him your sacrifice in his behalf, which he recognizes fully enough, I believe,” Wright continued. “But there is that in the book that will get him general recognition as a weak sister,* I’m afraid.”
“I am letting him out today,” Wright’s letter concluded sympathetically, “and no doubt you will hear from Nick himself. He is intelligent and has many charming qualities, notwithstanding his defects. He should make the most of them.”
The letter is dated April 22, 1934. Wright was more than amenable to having Thornton Wilder make a guest appearance at Taliesin, but the playwright whose services Ray dangled before the architect never did materialize at Spring Green. Harold Stark, who ended his friendship with Ray as a consequence of this incident, did, though, lecturing the Fellowship on the “Steamboat Gothic” style of river architecture.
How could Ray feel anything but humiliation or betrayal to have been banished from the utopia of Taliesin?
One scar would follow another in Ray’s life, adding layers of complexity to his personality and character and art.
And yet, curiously, in public Ray never spoke less than warmly about the architect and his gloriously failed stint at Taliesin. In interviews with publicists and journalists over the years, Ray always emphasized the broad artistic and philosophical perspective he had absorbed at Taliesin. He even linked his own preference for the wide-screen CinemaScope format, with its horizontal lines of visual expression, to Wright’s aesthetic: “the horizontal was essential for Wright.”
In private, Ray was nearly as positive. The apprentice was anxious to repair his rift with the master, corresponding with him several times after leaving the Fellowship. In one 1937 letter, he told the architect, “I think of you and Taliesin often, with warmth.” In that letter, which came three years after his removal from Spring Green, Ray attributed “one of the principal causes of my ‘maladjustment’ while living at Taliesin” to his lingering loneliness for Jean Evans, whom he’d left back in New York. (Wright dictated a cordial but noncommittal reply: “Glad to hear from you. Hope things come through alright . . .”)
Whatever the precise nature of his “maladjustment,” leaving the Fellowship meant the end of all those promising tomorrows at Taliesin. After saying good-bye to his mother in La Crosse, Ray left Wisconsin in the late spring. He would never again live in his home state.
According to Bernard Eisenschitz, instead of returning to New York Ray left immediately for Mexico. Yet surely he was back in Greenwich Village by late May 1934, briefly helping the Theatre Collective stage an evening of playlets, with Aria da Capo topping the bill. The group performed Millay’s one-act, a Ray favorite, a number of times in the late spring and early summer at several Lower Manhattan venues. (Ray and the left-wing Theatre Collective presented it as Aria da Capo in Red.)
However, Ray had fallen deep into what Jean Evans liked to call a “blue funk.” (She was susceptible to them too.) In a pattern he’d repeat after other disasters in his life, Ray abandoned Jean Evans and New York and headed to Mexico in a car driven by Frederick W. Dupee. Dupee, who barely knew Ray, would go on to a distinguished career as a literary critic and founder of the Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books. But they had a few things in common: Chicago (where Dupee was born and raised), some mutual friends, their shared left-wing politics, and a deep desire “to write something” while exploring south of the border.
The two men separated in Mexico City. Ray wandered the city seemingly without purpose—another pattern that would recur. He wrote to “My dear Mr. and Mrs. Wright” from Acapulco, reporting that happiness was scarce on the ground in Mexico. “Mexico is essentially a sad country (I think a thing I’ve had too much in common with it) and that thunder is always threatening,” Ray wrote. All the fiestas ended sadly too, he added.
Yet he had found peace in Acapulco, Ray admitted; the ocean calmed him and the natives were pleasant. He was anxious to write something of merit but found that Mexico had a quality in common with Spring Green: “stuff too overpowering for me to cope with.”
Playing to Wright’s interests, Ray reported on Mexico City’s building boom. He cited Carlos Obreg
ón Santacilia as akin to “F. L. W.” and said he’d briefly occupied a house designed by Juan O’Gorman in San Angel, a section of Mexico City. But he derided Gorman’s architecture as inhuman and cliché.
Ray described tramping through the jungles of the Yucatán, traveling to Oaxaca, and toiling briefly in the jewel mines of Taxco. Living on tortillas, he was nostalgic for the communal meals at Taliesin and said he wished he could return and join the group cooking next Sunday night. “Retrospect from a distant perspective is often painful,” he wrote wistfully to Wright, less than two months after leaving Spring Green.
Ray’s letters to Taliesin are the only surviving artifacts from this trip. Yet they confirm that, as always, the adventure was a tonic for him. He got his drinking under control and concluded his painful period of retrospect, feeling renewed and reinvigorated. By the end of 1934 he had shoved the writing urge aside and decided that what gave him the most pleasure in life was acting and theater. Lured by left-wing friends who promised exciting stage work, Ray hopped a bus back to Jean Evans and New York.
Chapter Three
Agitation of the Essence
1935–1940
Ray was back in New York by January 1935, tan, rejuvenated, and armed with a new moniker—“Nik Ray”—to match his new proletarian persona. He went straight from the bus station to a five-room apartment in a brownstone in the East Village, home and headquarters of a fledgling group calling itself the Theatre of Action. A group of Theatre Collective and Workers Laboratory Theater loyalists had merged and taken over a Thirteenth Street flat, dedicating themselves to left-wing stage activities. The Theatre of Action dubbed themselves the “Shock Troupe”—the shock troops of the theater revolution, as one member recalled, “ready to jump into action at a moment’s notice.”
While Ray was in Mexico the radical theater movement had exploded across America.
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