Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  For Injunction Granted, Losey would draw heavily on Meyerhold’s ideas of symbolism and on the epic style of the German director Erwin Piscator. Like them, Losey wanted to erase the barriers between stage and spectator. More visually oriented than many theater directors, he employed an Eisenstein-like compression of many small quick scenes in his Living Newspapers—a style “approaching a movie technique,” in his words.

  Ray had friends galore in the large cast, including Norman Lloyd, one of several Theatre of Action veterans recruited for roles. Lloyd again claimed top billing as master of ceremonies of the extravaganza, playing a pantomiming clown who plunks a Virgil Thomson ditty on his toy piano. The backstage manager had a few bits onstage, way down in the billing, still stubbornly listed as “Nik Ray.”

  Anticipation mounted for the July opening, but so did opposition from rabid anti–New Dealers, who saw Injunction Granted as nothing less than veiled Communist propaganda. Once again Hallie Flanagan had to plead for script softening; Watson and Arent were amenable, and solutions were negotiated, but Losey quit in a huff just before opening night. “I was not a member of the Communist Party at that time,” he always insisted. (He did join later.)

  Ray stayed on, however—the first dramatic evidence of the practical streak that would mark his career in New York and later in Hollywood. More than once he inherited other stage or film directors’ unfinished works, several times completing projects abandoned by his predecessors. In this case, Ray effectively supervised the toned-down Injunction Granted after Losey resigned, directing backstage traffic while overseeing the scenery, lighting, and musical cues.

  Perhaps Ray was covering for Losey, who had the luxury of making a grand gesture of defiance while keeping in touch with the stage manager about fine points of the show. The two remained friendly, and soon after, when Losey announced plans to form a “Social Circus,” a new left-wing theater ensemble that aimed for topical cabaret and meaningful political plays without qualms or censorship, Ray was one of the first to donate to the cause. (Kazan was another.)*

  When Injunction Granted opened in the last week of July 1936, liberal and left-leaning reviewers praised the latest Living Newspaper, while the political right heaped predictable scorn upon it. But the crowds were steady—Flanagan privately maintained that union leaders ordered their faithful to fill the theater—and Ray maintained his perch as stage manager throughout the three-month run. It was the best money he had yet earned in New York.

  “Nik Ray” the actor still made fleeting appearances for political causes. One last glimpse of that identity came in September 1936, for a hotel ballroom presentation of Kenneth White’s Who Fights This Battle? directed by none other than Joseph Losey. Five performances aided the anti-Franco forces led by Communists in the Spanish Civil War. Paul Bowles contributed the music, and Earl Robinson served as pianist, organist, and conductor. Ray and Norman Lloyd both performed key roles onstage.

  By the time the Living Newspaper play closed in October, “Nik Ray” had reverted permanently to Nicholas Ray. More important, less than two years after returning to New York from Mexico, Ray had fixed his place in left-wing circles as not just an obscure actor but as a backstage manager who could be trusted with a job as big, complex, and pressure-ridden as Injunction Granted.

  Morris Watson, who was grateful to him for sticking with Injunction Granted, recommended Ray for his next paying job, which entailed another promotion. In the words of the first small item ever to mention him in the New York Times, Ray was tapped to “head the professional labor-drama school” of Brookwood Labor College, located about forty miles north of New York.

  Though it resembled a traditional campus on an estate outside the village of Katonah, in Westchester County, Brookwood was a college that trained labor union organizers and officers. Founded in 1919, and financed by radical idealists and workers’ organizations, the college offered a socialist-based education that supported goals of peace and unionism. Over time Brookwood had aligned itself with the upstart CIO against the conservative AFL.

  The college prided itself on original theater laced with labor songs and humor, often a collaborative effort between students and the faculty. One of its celebrated plays was Sit-Down, which portrayed the 1936–37 sit-down strike of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) against General Motors in Detroit. (The sit-down tactics won the recognition of the UAW as bargaining agent.) Ray had enjoyed Sit-Down during its rowdy tour of northeastern cities.

  Kindred spirit Earl Robinson (like Ray one of the few non–New Yorkers in the Theatre of Action) went along on the adventure as resident composer of Brookwood’s drama program. “We had two hours a day,” Robinson remembered. Ray “was allowed to put together a group of performers, and I would be an integral part of it as music director. Nick was to build a show to take touring through the unions in the spring. We worked with improvisation—all the things he’d learned during the Theatre of Action he was applying here as director. We had rehearsals, worked with the union members in production stuff, and had music classes.”

  They were hired for eight months at $120 monthly, but their tenure lasted less than three. Drained by AFL-CIO warfare and other factional infighting, Brookwood Labor College was steadily losing benefactors and cutting programs. It would close permanently early in 1938.

  Ray managed to get out before Thanksgiving 1936. Having seen the handwriting on the wall, he applied for a management post with the Works Progress Administration in Washington, D.C. By January he and Jean Evans had moved from their New York apartment into a large house in Arlington, Virginia, a short drive from the nation’s capital. In six brief months Ray had gone from welfare checks to an annual salary of $3,200, and from nonentity in the Theatre of Action to a man suddenly thrust into the center of national culture—and controversy.

  A few hours from New York by car or train, Washington was worlds apart from anything in Ray’s experience. Arriving in the dead of winter, Ray found the city to be southern in climate and backward in other ways. For one thing, everything revolved around the government.

  Ray had received the tip about the job opening from sculptor Lenore Thomas, a friend of Alonzo Hauser’s working for the WPA in Washington. Someone was needed to run the theater branch of the Resettlement Administration, which was in the process of being absorbed by the Recreation Division of the WPA. Part of the same New Deal agenda that fostered the Federal Theatre Project, the Recreation Division specialized in “folklore studies,” collecting folk art documents and dispatching out-of-work artists of all types to rural and neglected areas of America, where they were expected to nurture grassroots culture. Its offices were in the Walker-Johnson building on New York Avenue, just a block from the White House.

  The WPA empowered a number of folklore divisions to collect all manner of cultural artifacts: photographs; the texts of local plays; transcriptions and recordings of folk songs, tall tales, and oral legends; all manner of artwork and crafts; and documentation of community dances and rituals. Intended for future use by scholars and entertainers, the artifacts were archived by the Library of Congress and cooperating universities. This national treasure hunt enlisted unemployed professionals from all walks of life, and Ray wasn’t the only one destined for later fame. For that matter, many of the folk artists they discovered would also go on to popular acclaim.

  Ray’s original mandate was theater, but his interest in architecture, art, and music allowed him to range widely—never more widely than in his three years with the WPA. Nor did he ever travel as freely inside the United States. Though his job was to assign and support others in the field, he hated being cooped up inside his office, and he journeyed to many small towns and communities throughout the East Coast and parts of the Midwest and South to distribute funds, meet local artists, and cheerlead the arts.

  At first Jean Evans accompanied him on these adventures, especially in 1937, his first exciting year with the WPA. They ventured into the Alleghenies near Pittsburgh, where Ray had been alerte
d to the genius of an ancient fiddler, whose tunes they collected. (“Cabbage soup with a piece of pork and canned corn had been the evening meal,” he wrote.) They spent weeks in North Carolina helping rural inhabitants stage a harvest pageant, and similarly generous time on a farm near Scottsboro, Alabama, helping shape a local program of folk ballads, dance, and theater.

  Together they traveled throughout Appalachia and as far south as Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, meeting fishermen and miners and sharecroppers and tenant farmers, rallying enthusiasts and experts and artists for community festivals, performance recitals, plays, concerts, art exhibits, and radio broadcasts in small towns and cities. “I lit a show with miners’ lamps and used a haywagon for a stage,” Ray recalled proudly years later.

  When Jean stayed home, other companions hopped in the car. When Elia Kazan visited Washington, he ended up hitching a ride with Ray to Louisiana to meet Huddie Ledbetter, the gravelly-voiced folk and blues musician who called himself Lead Belly and whose checkered past included incarceration for violent crimes. Though armed with an introduction from WPA musicologist Alan Lomax—whose father had discovered Lead Belly, only to be sued by the singer later to void their contract—they didn’t know what to expect. Ledbetter kindly invited them into his home, served them rice and beans, and later serenaded the two with “Mary Don’t You Weep, Don’t You Mourn,” “a song about Tennessee water” tasting “like turpentine,” as Kazan reminisced in his autobiography, and “Irene,” the latter destined to become “a big fat bourgeois hit.”

  Like Ray, who was also meeting the legendary musician for the first time, “I was in awe of Lead Belly,” Kazan recalled. “He was reputed to have killed a man in a ‘bottomland fracas.’ Had he? . . . Either way, they’d hung it on him and packed him off to a prison camp.”

  Some of the folk artists Ray encouraged were apolitical, but often enough the arts projects reflected his own leftist politics. While in Alabama, he received a letter from white high school students from a town forty miles south of Birmingham, asking for advice and assistance in staging an antiprejudice play. He drove to meet with them and help with their plans. Visiting Chattanooga, Tennessee, he assisted a chapter of the militant International Ladies Garment Workers, sponsoring a play protesting Japanese aggression in the Sino-Japanese War.

  After all, nurturing the folk arts had been part and parcel of the left-liberal New Deal agenda ever since FDR was first elected. Eleanor Roosevelt took a special interest in the WPA’s artistic reclamation missions, inviting many of the traditional musicians first recorded by Ray or the Lomaxes to the White House and the presidential retreat at Warm Springs, Georgia. Ray attended conferences and social occasions with the First Lady as well as FDR’s top advisers, though it may be too much to believe that he was “a dear friend of the La Follettes and of Eleanor Roosevelt,” as his sister Helen claimed, after visiting Washington and attending one of the WPA shows on the White House lawn with Mary La Follette.*

  Ray found other ways to bring his fieldwork back to Washington. Late in 1937, for example, he hosted a series of talks at the Federal Workers School on Seventeenth Street. He debated the transformative political power of poetry with writer Floyd Dell, a firebrand who had been a leader of the Chicago Renaissance, a founder of the Provincetown Players and an editor of the radical magazine New Masses; now he was drawing a WPA paycheck. According to one Washington paper, Dell argued, “by quoting poetry, that poetry cannot have effect on trade unions or the labor movement generally,” while Ray argued “with equal heat that poetry can and does have a tremendous effect on labor and union activity.” The audience was treated to phonograph recordings of sharecroppers reciting verse, which Ray himself had recorded.

  One can imagine the smile on Ray’s face as he listened to those sharecroppers. The first year was a time of hard work but also sunny optimism, and no one seemed more hardworking or optimistic than the tall, broad-shouldered WPA emissary. No one was more patient with the amateurs, and ever since his College days Ray had been equally at ease mingling with dignitaries.

  The happy, optimistic year 1937 was topped when Jean became pregnant—or, as Ray boasted proudly in a letter, when his wife announced she was “with stowaway which will gain air on its face and consciousness sometime in November.” Gaining air on November 24, the stowaway was named Anthony Nicholas Ray, his first name a nod to Anthony Mann, an older stage-director friend of Ray’s back in New York whose career was gathering momentum with the Federal Theatre.

  No one embodied the spirit of optimism more than Alan Lomax, a tall, swarthy Texan with a booming speaking (and singing) voice. He and Ray became soul mates during the WPA years. Ray “was certainly one of the most splendid young men in the whole world,” Lomax once recalled. “He seemed to me to be the person I’d always dreamed of being. He was very powerful and gentle and wonderful to look at. He had a kind of a grin and a laughter that were the same thing. They were always playing on his face when he was discussing the most serious matters.”

  Collecting folk traditions ran in Lomax’s genes, and he intended to live up to the legacy of his father, the pioneering musicologist John A. Lomax, who was semiretired by the late 1930s but still an honorary curator of the Archive of American Folk Song in Washington. Born in 1915, Alan was slightly younger than Ray, and initially worked as assistant to another pioneering archivist, Charles Seeger of the Federal Music Project, from whose basement offices in the Library of Congress Lomax took up the tireless pursuit and documentation of folk music.

  Lomax’s enthusiasm for his cause was boundless and infectious—perhaps to a fault. One person who worked with Lomax compared him to Casaubon, the mythology scholar in Middlemarch, who ensnared people in the web of his enthusiasms and the “greater-than-self ” importance of his mission, then sucked all the vitality out of them before they realized the mission was endless.

  Ray fed on other people’s energy and exuberance, and he was gladly infected. By late 1937 their friendship had so blossomed that Lomax and his wife, Elizabeth, moved into the Rays’ Arlington house, which had extra bedrooms. Soon, their shared house became an after-hours gathering spot for itinerant musicians and WPA colleagues. Ray and Lomax doubled as hosts; both frustrated vocalists, they sang duets and were even known to sing along on their own field recordings. At parties or alone together, their singing rang out competitively. Lomax thought of them “like Damon and Pythias,” in his words, “like brothers.”

  Community theater was a constant challenge for Ray; it was time-consuming and expensive and difficult to nurture on the grassroots level. Recording, in contrast, was something Ray had loved since his radio days, and he could easily make recordings of individuals and small groups on behalf of the WPA—and future generations—wherever he traveled. More and more under the sway of Lomax, he lugged a cumbersome Presto recorder, complete with turntable and amplifier, along on the road.

  Ray’s musician friends and WPA colleagues were all the more precious in Washington, where enemies of the New Deal were plentiful. Belief in the transformative power of art was not the exclusive province of the left, but it was an open secret that, as with the Theatre of Action or the Living Newspaper, many members of the Ray/Lomax circle were Communists or nearly so. “We had a small underground cell in Washington,” sculptor Lenore Thomas recalled. “None of us carried cards. Mostly we sat around and talked and studied Marxism-Leninism, dialect materialism etc. We were not very dangerous, but very earnest.”

  The WPA leftists grew apprehensive in August 1938 when the House Committee on Un-American Activities (later known by the acronym HUAC), spearheaded by Republicans and conservative Democrats, launched hearings into how the Communist Party USA supposedly overran the Federal Theatre Project. Stephen Karnot, Al Saxe, and other friends of the Rays were attacked in public testimony (one witness described Saxe, Ray’s best man, as a zealot who “ate, drank and slept Communism”). The Theatre of Action and the Living Newspaper were among the offending groups cited in public testimony, w
ith newspaper items and cast lists accepted as evidentiary material in executive session.

  Hallie Flanagan was not allowed to defend her noble intentions for the Federal Theatre Project until December 1938, by which time she had been thoroughly pilloried by witnesses and the press. Conservative congressmen piled on, accusing her of Red sympathies and ties.

  Six months later, in 1939, Congress canceled funding for the Federal Theatre Project. But the hearings had focused on New York, while the WPA cell in the government’s own backyard escaped scrutiny. Ray and his leftist friends had left the Federal Theatre behind, and though it would remain a storied chapter in their lives, most people in the left-wing theater movement had already soured on a government program that never stopped trying to appease its right-wing critics. To Ray and the others, the HUAC episode was more of the same anti–New Deal wind that had been whipping up a frenzy ever since FDR was first elected. Before too long, they all felt, it would surely blow over.

  New York City was close enough for Ray to visit often, seeing friends and keeping up with theater and shows. In New York the latest vogue was political cabaret, and Manhattan nightclubs were suddenly teeming with topical song-and-dance message revues. Ray’s favorite place was the Cabaret TAC (acronym for the Theatre Arts Committee for Peace and Democracy), a midtown nightspot, where his old musician friend Earl Robinson was among the performers. It seemed as though everyone on the left in show business was dabbling in café society revues, including Joseph Losey.

  Ray and his D.C. friends thought the success of the Cabaret TAC might be replicated in Washington, and early in 1939 they formed the Washington Political Cabaret. Their topical cabaret debuted in March of that year, above Childs Restaurant, a cafeteria chain for the working class, on Pennsylvania Avenue. Though not officially underwritten by the New Deal, most of the participants were Ray’s WPA colleagues; in many ways, the cabaret summed up Ray’s artistic eclecticism during the years 1937–39. At the same time, however, the program was not so very different from the loose-knit musical revues that Ray had staged back at La Crosse Teachers College, or that the Theatre of Action had performed on city streets in its heyday.