The song-and-dance numbers and message skits in Ray’s cabaret were woven together by a master of ceremonies. Bernard C. Schoenfeld, at that time a radio writer for the Interior Department—later he too became a Hollywood director—wrote most of the sketches and song lyrics. Freda Berla composed the music, while the well-known modern dancer Sophia Delza contributed choreography. The approach was generally light and satirical (“intellectual entertainment, liberal in tone, but not grinding any one’s particular axe,” said the New York Times). But the song “Mister Lincoln” was an antiprejudice showstopper, and Jean Evans penned the show’s ambitious, serious-minded centerpiece, “Message from a Refugee,” involving the entire cast of fifteen performers.
Although Ray did a little writing—collaborating with Schoenfeld on a humorous sketch about a government gal, stranded by busy traffic on an F Street island, falling in love with a fellow castaway—his main contribution was directing. “Entire Production Staged by Nicholas Ray,” the program announced; the Washington Political Cabaret got Ray his second mention in the New York Times, and the Washington Post’s drama critic, Richard L. Coe, agreed that the director was the revue’s true “guiding star.” Ray and friends had concocted a “novel and refreshing” way to spend Saturday nights out on the town, Coe wrote.
Ray reached another milestone a few weeks later, in June 1939, when the British sovereigns, Queen Elizabeth and King George V, visited Washington. In their honor, Ray helped Alan Lomax organize an “Evening of American Music” at the Executive Mansion. Besides popular recording star Kate Smith and classical singers Marian Anderson and Lawrence Tibbett, the entertainment they assembled included the Soco Gap Square-Dance Team from the Appalachians, the Coon Creek Girls from Kentucky, the North Carolina Spiritual Singers, and twenty-four-year-old Lomax himself singing cowboy songs to his own guitar accompaniment.
The Washington Political Cabaret ran its course; as refreshing as the revue may have been, the capital cabaret couldn’t count on New York–size audiences night after night.
Ray’s initial fervor for the WPA had also begun to cool. He was a role player in the White House triumphs, and they were few and far between. None of his discoveries was another Lead Belly; more often he scrounged for obscure talent in the field, with limited time and money.
He made several trips to the Midwest, passing through Wisconsin and visiting his mother, one time ranging as far west as South Dakota. In October 1939, he convened a temporary WPA school in an armory in Mitchell, South Dakota, gathering specialists from Madison, Milwaukee, Des Moines, and the Dakotas for a two-week training course in arts and crafts and community recreation. In Mitchell, for example, Ray collected thirty-eight recordings on eleven twelve-inch discs. The modest pickings included a local production of Romeo and Juliet, area fiddlers, cowboy songs, Paul Bunyan tales, and area lumberjacks singing “Oh, Susannah!” and “Home on the Range.”
“I was very irritated with the fact that I had only two or three hours at the most each day in which to find, make dates with, and record the few people I had at Mitchell,” Ray wrote grumpily to Dr. Harold Spivack, chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress on October 30, 1939, “and consequently I’m quite dissatisfied with the recordings.”
Such trips could be a real letdown, replete with missed opportunities. Ray felt “confined to the Mitchell area because of my official responsibilities,” he wrote, sacrificing “entrée to the river rats of the Jim, west of the Missouri River to the whole western South Dakota area, which includes mining and sheep and cattle industries. As well as an Indian reservation and a Mennonite colony.”
He referred to a familiar ambition “to write something” worthwhile, this time for the WPA, explaining that he had been thwarted by bureaucratic demands. “I have made several attempts to outline and develop in a rather comprehensive way my ideas on the origin, development, and the decline of the Folk Theatre in America. I can not [sic] do it while I am being constantly interrupted by making train schedules and carrying on my other duties.”
More often than not, Ray sat shuffling paperwork in his D.C. office, feeling increasingly imprisoned in the system. He had once fancied himself a stage performer, even a director, but now he was turning into a pencil-pushing bureaucrat. He began keeping a stash of bourbon in his desk drawer; between those dulling days at the office and his long nights with new musician friends in D.C. and on the road, his drinking, under control in New York, shot up.
The birth of Ray’s son, a joyous milestone in his life, marked the beginning of the end of his marriage and family in a way he couldn’t have foreseen and that can’t be easily explained. Both Jim Backus in Rebel Without a Cause and James Mason in Bigger Than Life long to be good fathers but fail spectacularly, grasping for excuses as they’re overcome by drastic circumstances.
Jean Evans was pleasant and good-natured to a fault, but the steady stream of visitors to their Arlington house took a toll on the young mother and child. By the late 1930s the left-wingers were drifting away, but the musicians continued to proliferate: Lead Belly passed through often, as did the ragtime and jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who was playing at D.C. clubs and recording for Lomax and the Library of Congress. Earl Robinson, Ray’s musician friend from the Theatre of Action days, also crashed at the house whenever he came to town.
The house parties sometimes ran all night, and Ray was often the last one standing, smiling, bleary-eyed, a drink swirling in his hand. Home and family were personal prisons that Ray would flee or wreck repeatedly in his life; they were as anathema to him as a desk in an office. But Evans too struggled with domesticity and felt inadequate as a mother.
Ray’s Washington friends, including Alan Lomax, liked to blame Ray’s bad habits on the hectic lifestyle and pressures he suffered in New York; the New Yorkers he knew blamed his behavior on Washington, which they found a pretentious, treacherous maze. For Evans, her years in Washington were all about “rushing around, being impressed, impressing, grinding axes,” in her words. “I despised all that.”
In New York, Ray and Evans had enjoyed a loving, monogamous relationship for several years. But in Washington their marriage was endangered not only by Ray’s drinking and partying but by a resumption of the womanizing that came all too easily to a big, handsome, sweet-smiling man.
Everyone who knew the couple seemed to know about Ray’s affairs, which hurt Evans even more. “He wasn’t true to her,” said Pete Seeger, archivist Charles Seeger’s youngest son from his first marriage. The tall, thin, apple-cheeked Seeger hung around with the WPAers before dropping out of Harvard and joining the circle full-time. “I pitied his wife.”
Later in his life, Ray would admit that he cycled through a pattern of attraction and repulsion with the women in his life. “Out of the blue he once told me, ‘I’m afraid that sex destroys intimacy more often than it creates it,’ ” Gavin Lambert wrote of the director, who became his lover briefly in the mid-1950s. The only woman he was ever “truly happy with,” Ray confessed, was Jean Evans—though he took the lead in destroying that happiness.
He and Evans talked over their differences. Evans insisted her husband should consult a psychologist about his self-destructive habits. She thrived on analysis and couldn’t live without her appointments. Ray wasn’t sure therapy would work for him, but he agreed to give it a try.
Ray’s WPA contract was due to run out but he continued to cast his lot with the indefatigable Alan Lomax. At one point the two friends had tried to collaborate on a play about “the growth of jazz,” and another time they schemed to produce ten-minute films under Library of Congress sponsorship about “the Holiness Church, spirituals, railroad songs, and music of the Southwest,” according to Lomax biographer John Szwed. Ray and Lomax envisioned the established documentarist Joris Ivens and budding filmmaker Joseph Losey—an occasional visitor to their shared home in D.C.—as partners in the formation of a small company devoted to making short, socially conscious films for theatrical release, but the i
dea died for lack of funding.
Though still engaged in field studies for the Library of Congress, in early 1940 Lomax was offered a chance to produce folk music segments for a long-running CBS radio series called American School of the Air, which was beamed into U.S. public schools for half an hour on Tuesday mornings. Lead Belly could be a headliner, and Pete Seeger, who had moved in with the Rays and Lomaxes, would also play music and sing songs. Lomax was initially wary of radio, but Ray urged him to accept the offer and together they planned how to organize and script the show.
In the first week of March 1940, Ray, Lomax, and Seeger took the train to New York for the sold-out Grapes of Wrath concert to benefit migrant workers at the Forrest Theater. Seeger was somewhere on the bill—making an underwhelming public folksinging debut—but a dust-bowl balladeer from Oklahoma named Woody Guthrie proved the night’s real sensation.
Guthrie had gained his first fame on the West Coast, touring migrant camps and singing topical songs on the airwaves, before his unabashed radicalism cost him his job (THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS was scrawled on his guitar). After the Grapes of Wrath benefit, Ray and Lomax wended their way backstage and Lomax bent Guthrie’s ear, persuading him to come to Washington, record his music for the Library of Congress, and join the School of the Air project.
Guthrie came and stayed as a guest at the Arlington house with Ray and his wife and the Lomaxes. The singer’s musical purity and songs of the common man made him a god to some, but he was a god who chain-smoked and drank like a fiend and proudly lived the life of a rambler who didn’t know or care where his next meal was coming from. He had a maddening habit, like Ray, of making you wait forever sometimes before he said something. He slept in bed in his muddy boots until reproached by his hosts and thereafter made a point of sleeping on the floor with his lumber jacket as a blanket. He preferred to eat while standing up—to avoid bourgeois softening, he explained. He played the same Carter Family recordings, especially his favorite outlaw ballad “John Hardy,” over and over again, until people felt like screaming.
Aunt Molly Jackson, a Harlan County, Kentucky, militant folksinger also recording for Lomax and the Library of Congress, moved in around the same time. “Life was hell,” Evans said. “Woody didn’t talk. But he’d break empty liquor bottles by tossing them into the fireplace. Aunt Molly, whenever she slid from one end of the couch to the other, would say, ‘Children, I tore my ass!’ Then there was a cowboy who had ridden his horse all the way from Texas. He was recording at the Library of Congress too, so he tied the horse to a post in our back yard . . .”
Evans had found a new job, though, giving her an escape hatch and a temporary solution to her marriage woes. She was chosen from among thousands of applicants for a post writing women’s articles and Sunday human-interest features on the new advertising-free tabloid PM. A daily financed by unorthodox Chicago millionaire Marshall Field III, PM would become known to friends and foes alike as “a cross between The New Yorker and The Daily Worker” for its literate, left-wing slant. Buoyed by the prospect, Evans left for New York—and PM.
The folk music program School of the Air went ahead, but in half-baked fashion: After Guthrie and the others introduced their songs on air, CBS insisted on having them formally orchestrated by Aaron Copland or Seeger’s respectable father, Charles. The result satisfied no one, and the series was called off after a few weeks. “The experiment, which must have cost CBS a small fortune, was a colossal failure,” Lomax recalled.
Regardless, the experiment gave CBS a taste for folk music—and a measure of confidence in Lomax and his scruffy band of followers. Lomax pitched the network on a Plan B: a fifteen-minute, thrice-weekly, late-night radio show of folksy banter and traditional music, a kind of School of the Air for discerning adults. Lomax would supervise the show from Washington, but Ray and the musicians would stage the episodes in the network’s broadcasting studios in New York. The arrangement allowed the musicians to work in New York, where they’d be able to line up more gigs—and allowed Ray to follow Jean Evans back to the city.
CBS said yes, adding the new late-night series to its projected fall 1940 lineup. While School of the Air had been virtually pro bono, its nighttime spinoff, called Back Where I Come From (as in “Back where I come from, folks used to say . . .”), would bestow regular paychecks on Lomax (as writer-producer), Ray (cowriter and director), and the chronically empty-pocketed musicians. Guthrie and Seeger hit the road on a last tramp while the details were being ironed out.
Ray returned to New York in May 1940, briefly moving back into an East Village apartment with Jean Evans and their three-year-old son, Tony. Ray vowed to see a psychiatrist and quit boozing, but Evans saw through her husband’s good intentions with sympathy and clarity. He was a “wonderful man, not to be married to,” Evans told Bernard Eisenschitz.
Rather than live together fractiously, the couple soon decided on a formal trial separation. Ray began to live without a fixed address, crashing around in friends’ apartments, which he liked. This was one of the things he had in common with Guthrie—settling down unsettled him.
Even as his marriage fell apart, Ray had to register for the draft, to comply with the yearlong peacetime conscription Congress had enacted after the fall of France in late June 1940. But something that Ray did or said caused him to be rejected by the draft. Eisenschitz wrote that Ray was pardoned from military service “because of rheumatoid arthritis and the congenital cardiac malfunction” that also hobbled his father and grandfather. In one interview, producer John Houseman said that Ray’s “bad heart” had disqualified him; another time, Houseman attributed it to a “rheumatic heart” (a different condition altogether). But, according to Houseman, Ray exacerbated matters by informing the draft board—pointedly, just as he was separating from his wife—about “his homosexual experiences as a young man.”
It’s hard to know whether Ray had engaged in dalliances with other men since his fling with Professor O’Hara in Chicago, almost a decade before. But perhaps he did perceive a connection between the rupture of his marriage and his divided sexuality. Perhaps he did tell the draft board—and his wife—about his attraction to men.
Then again, Ray may also have had political motives. After the controversial Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact in August 1939, the Communist Party USA staunchly promoted a neutral stance toward Hitler. Good Communists were expected to evade any commitments to U.S. military service—a diktat that persisted until Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941. From that point on, American Communists were encouraged to support the war . . . and enlist.
Whether he contrived to abide by the Hitler-Stalin pact, confessed his bisexuality, or pleaded a weak heart, Ray was disqualified from military service. Which left nothing more to stand in the way of the next stepping stone in his career: directing Back Where I Come From.
Chapter Four
“Ungathered”
1940–1946
In spite of his marital discord and draft pressures, Ray felt good to be back at home in New York. He spent the summer of 1940 shaping the pilot episode of Back Where I Come From, the radio show on which he and Alan Lomax intended to introduce the joys of folk music to the American public.
Nominally supervising the show from the remove of Washington, D.C., Lomax was the music expert and credited producer of the series. CBS network officials viewed Ray as his subordinate. But Ray was the man with radio experience who’d handle the actual broadcasting, and in practice Lomax treated Ray, who not only directed but also collaborated on the scripts, as an equal partner.
This was the first national forum for Nicholas Ray—the take-charge personality who had won a high school radio contest, whose eclectic creativity never slept during his college years, and who had honed his backstage management skills with the Federal Theatre Project and Works Progress Administration. Corralling so many individualistic musicians into one happy family would be a challenge, but it was one for which the Theater of Action had prepared Ray, teaching him
patience and the ability to foster solidarity.
Along with Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and young Pete Seeger on banjo, the cast included the rotund, dulcet-voiced Burl Ives, who was just beginning to make a name for himself as a folksinger; a silky-voiced African American folk and blues musician named Josh White, who’d risen out of the South to conquer New York; and the Golden Gate Quartet, a jubilee-style gospel unit from Virginia.
Each episode of Back Where I Come From, Lomax and Ray decided, would be stitched with a musical motif: “Nonsense Songs,” “Work Songs,” “Crime and the Weather,” “True Love.” In the beginning, Lomax generally wrote the first drafts, with Ray filling in, though as time went on they often reversed the order. Since everyone involved (except Lead Belly) was resolutely left-wing—either Communist Party members or sympathizers—each program also would deliver a message beyond the entertainment, lightly woven into the back-porch patter and songs.
Lomax and Ray were on the same wavelength, and the first script came together swiftly. Then, in the studio, Ray was back in his element, fine-tuning the recording setup—and, more important, fine-tuning performers unfamiliar with radio mikes. After working hard to set the right tone with the pilot episode, the show made its debut in August 1940; then, starting in September, it aired for fifteen minutes at ten thirty P.M. three nights a week. Ray and Lomax were disappointed when the respectable Clifton Fadiman, head of the Book of the Month Club, who’d agreed to narrate the series, quit after the pilot. But Earl Robinson and others would rotate as host after Fadiman’s departure.
Nicholas Ray Page 10
