A worse blow came when Woody Guthrie, their marquee name, made an angry exit. From the start, Lomax and Ray had carefully crafted scripts for Guthrie to take the lead in threading the musical and political themes deftly through each show. Accounts differ, but evidently the cantankerous Guthrie grew discomfited by the show’s audience-friendly approach—and by Ray. “Woody especially felt intimidated by Nick’s giving him cues,” wrote John Szwed in Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World, “and told him he froze whenever he pointed to him.” Worse, according to Guthrie, Ray appeared to favor the crowd-pleasing Josh White over the grittier, more authentic bluesman Lead Belly.
Though White had his own story of struggle and hardship, having grown up making race records in Jim Crow–segregated South Carolina, and though even Guthrie considered him “the Joe Louis of the blues guitar,” the bluesman had stirred some resentment by parlaying his handsome face and sweet-and-seductive baritone to advantage in New York. White’s sweeter blues boasted a huge uptown Manhattan following; this irked Guthrie, who preferred the more subversive Lead Belly, considering him “a regular philosopher of chain gangs, prisons, wardens, and hard times in the country.”
Indeed, Ray was favoring White. For one thing, Lead Belly couldn’t read very well, making it difficult for him to manage his lines in the script. When retakes didn’t help, Ray resorted to desperate measures. After Lead Belly sang, he directed White to step up to the mike and speak Lead Belly’s lines. “The over-all effect was ludicrous,” Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell wrote in The Life and Legend of Lead Belly. Guthrie was “furious and constantly berated Ray,” glaring at the director.
Ray stood his ground. He didn’t quite flash the iron fist, but this early—and unsuccessful—attempt to face down a star may have taught him a lasting lesson in forbearance. Guthrie glared and glowered until late October, when he finally stalked out of the CBS studio one day in the middle of a rehearsal session and took to the road to seek the real America—where, as he once declared, “there’s more of it under corn than under concrete.” In a letter to Lomax, he blamed his abrupt split on the straitjacket of the show, not Ray. “The fifteen minutes was a little packed,” Guthrie explained wryly. “The elevator run too straight up and straight down and the studio had too many radioactivities in it, and so I ducked off.”
Knowing that Guthrie had clashed with Ray, Lomax tried to act as peacemaker, sending a November 1, 1940, letter to the singer at a forwarding address in California. “I wish there was some way you and Nick could get together again,” Lomax wrote. “The first program that you failed to appear on just about broke my heart,” he added. “I’d like to hear your side of the story.”
But Guthrie did not write back. The show went on without the bard of the left, and Lomax stuck by Ray. The director felt miserable about alienating Guthrie, but everyone agreed that the singer had been looking for an out. Lead Belly himself was sanguine about the show, and Ray didn’t give up on him. Lead Belly’s role in the show kept evolving, as did everything else about Back Where I Come From. As far as anyone could tell, the series was a hit. The reviews were excellent, and the ratings were solid. Steady income had made Guthrie nervous. It made everyone else ecstatic.
The radio series was the first national exposure for all of them—including for the name Nicholas Ray, touted as the show’s director in hundreds of CBS publicity items sent around to America’s newspapers. So Ray and the others were all the more shocked when, in mid-February 1941, the ax fell on the show. According to Lomax, the word came down from on high: After six seemingly successful months on the air, CBS chairman William S. Paley let it be known that he personally objected to “goddam hillbilly music” on his network—and Back Where I Come From was abruptly canceled.
Ironically, a contrite Guthrie had just materialized, wiring Ray and offering to return to the broadcast. Informed that his gesture had come too late and the series had been dumped, Guthrie did an about-face, venturing a more generous assessment of the program and saying he wasn’t surprised by its fate. “Too honest again I suppose?” he wrote Lomax. “Maybe not purty enough.”
Though the show was gone forever, the musical-political camaraderie would continue off the air.
Sometime in late 1940, Ray moved into a Greenwich Village loft with Pete Seeger and two other activist folksingers, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell. The apartment they shared became known as the Almanac House after Seeger, Hays, and Lampell—sometimes joined by others, including Josh White—began playing left-wing benefits as the Almanac Singers. Their repertoire consisted of pro-union, civil rights, and antiwar songs, reflecting the Communist Party USA’s endorsement of the 1939 nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin. (After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the peace anthems were tossed into the circular file and the Almanac Singers began urging America to join the good fight against the Nazis.)
The Almanac House became Ray’s home away from home; it was also a revolving door for countless musicians, usually with leftist stripes, dropping in during their East Coast travels. This was Ray’s third experience in a commune living off family-style stewpot dinners, which were served to residents and visitors at a fourteen-foot picnic table with benches. On Sunday afternoons and weekend nights, the musicians charged guests a quarter or thirty-five cents to attend folk and blues jam-session rent parties, attended by some of New York’s best traditional musicians. Beer was ten cents a cup. As many as one hundred people attended the loft parties.
Another commune veteran, Earl Robinson from the Theatre of Action, seemed omnipresent, though he didn’t live at the Almanac House. Burl Ives, whom Ray had befriended during their radio days, was often there too. Besides their common love of folk music and similar political views, Ray and the rotund singer went on marathon drinking bouts that sometimes devolved into bouts of a different kind. More than once, Ray liked to boast, they waded into brawls together.
After his radio series was canceled, Ray did return briefly to the arms of Jean Evans, for one last serious try at family life. For a year and a half he shuttled between the Almanac House (whose actual address changed a few times) and stretches of rapprochement with Jean, moving into an East Village apartment with her and their son, Tony. There he tried to write something he could sell to radio or theater. While Ray was earning radio money, the family even had employed a maid to help with cleaning and babysitting Tony. Now they had “a tough time financially,” as Evans confessed, living on one income—hers. “Nick and I and Tony make a good set-up,” the PM journalist wrote to longtime friend Esther McCoy, “and I think we’re going to get really straight on our own problems. We’ve been very happy in many ways—and there’s something we’ve got now which we never had before—a kind of cohesiveness that comes with trouble.”
Ray finally began appointments with a psychiatrist. Swearing off drink, he devoted himself to writing. “We haven’t much social life these days and we don’t care much,” his wife wrote McCoy cheerfully. “We sit around with the few—very few—people who come up occasionally—drink tea—talk—laugh—play with Tony—like old home week.”
Ray had few job prospects. The Group Theatre had dissipated, and Elia Kazan and Bobby Lewis came around making noises about launching their own theater organization, to be called the Dollar Top Theatre (as in, tickets would cost a “dollar top”). They met with Ray early in the summer, looking to spin off a Dollar Top radio series like The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Kazan was just back from Hollywood, where he’d acted in small parts in a couple of Warner Bros. movies. He and Lewis still had to raise substantial money, and the wealthy left-wing patronage they’d expected was slow to coalesce. Still, both were optimistic.
Kazan was fond of Ray (they were “Gadget” and “Nik” to each other), but it was his wife, Molly, who really took Ray on as her personal rescue mission. Kazan didn’t envision any truly important job for Ray in the Dollar Top Theatre: Zachary Metz, who had written and directed sketches for the Mercury Theatre, was the radio progra
m’s nominal head, and he was already busy creating a pilot to be hosted by Earl Robinson. But Kazan had been a fan of Back Where I Come From, and he thought Ray might supervise the music for the Dollar Top series and any other radio programming they initiated. Ray’s friendship with Earl Robinson was part of his appeal, and Kazan also hoped Ray might recruit Alan Lomax as their folk music expert.
Meeting with Lewis, Kazan, and Thacher, Ray played them some favorite recordings and brainstormed ideas for packaging the series. Later that summer, Ray sent Lomax Kazan’s prospectus for the Dollar Top Theatre, asking if he’d like to get involved.
Ray told Lomax that Kazan had encouraged his idea for a spinoff series featuring three characters who meet in a night school: a European refugee, who would give voice to the world situation; an authentic American, “a Woodrow Davy Wilson Crockett Guthrie”; and “a gal who can sing ‘I Know Where I’m Goin’ ’ and ‘Darlin’ Corey.’ ”* The night school premise would offer “a logical frame for saying anything we’d like to say,” Ray wrote. He had started on the pilot, he told Lomax, but didn’t want to show the folklorist any pages until he had finished.
Ray also made it clear in his letter, however, that he wasn’t firmly attached to Kazan or the Dollar Top Theatre. Fishing for other opportunities, he told Lomax that he was willing to return to Washington and join him on some fieldwork, traveling around and recording folk music, if Lomax was willing. Aware that Lomax considered Washington a healthier environment for Ray than New York, the director pushed that button. “My need for getting out of New York for a while has become almost as important to me as the need to quit drinking was,” he explained, “except I had to do the latter before I could realize the importance of getting out of here. I don’t suppose it’s a thoroughly accomplished fact, even yet—but the analyst feels pretty good about it. Or maybe he just wants me to get a job so I can start giving him some money for a change. Enough of that—but believe me—I honest to god think I’ve begun to grow up.”
One thing Ray’s letter omitted was any mention of his wife. By midsummer, Ray had fallen into one of the deepest of his blue funks. He had quit his therapy sessions; the strain of psychoanalysis was so hard on him, Evans later recalled, that her husband lost his voice. When the Dollar Top Theatre went nowhere—and Lomax failed to bail him out—the family fell under the shadow of an eviction notice, and Ray started hitting the nightspots and drinking and staying away from home.
“That’s a wife’s profession,” wrangler Robert Mitchum informs dutiful wife Susan Hayward in Ray’s The Lusty Men, “forgiving her husband.” By September, though, Ray was no longer around to forgive. He had left the household, his first marriage finally over, though Evans wouldn’t file the legal papers for several months. Throughout his life, Ray would sustain long friendships with women, but only brief marriages: At nearly five years, his marriage to Jean Evans would be the longest of four. Yet for the rest of his life he would stay close to her, looking to her not only as the mother of their son but also for advice on writing and scripts.
For her part, Evans forgave Ray. Though she felt “angry and resentful” about their breakup, her anger was directed largely inward, as she upbraided herself for being a flawed wife and mother. “I am the way I am and he is the way he is,” she wrote to Esther McCoy, “and except for just and only that we could have had such a good life.” Their friendship survived, “tinged with tenderness,” as Bernard Eisenschitz wrote.
By the early summer of 1941, Woody Guthrie had returned to live in New York, moving into the Almanac House and joining the Almanac Singers. The place became all the more a magnet for visiting folk and blues singers, and after leaving his family Ray too rejoined the musical commune.
Back Where I Come From was widely admired in left-wing circles, particularly among musicians, and gave Ray a certain cachet. His roommates at the Almanac House knew he was out of work—and that his marriage had foundered as a consequence of his irresponsibility—but he always had friends who rooted for him, overlooking his faults in the belief that he tended to hurt himself more than he hurt others. This blamelessness would serve Ray in good stead in Hollywood, but it can’t have made any difference to the shame and guilt he carried with him.
After his radio money finally dried up, Ray was reduced to making pocket change helping out behind the scenes with benefits and shows in New York and other East Coast venues. Ever since his college days he’d prided himself on not needing much to live on—not true of Jean Evans and Tony, of course, and throughout his life Ray’s support payments proved erratic.
What little money he had, he spent on nightlife. Ray was a habitué of nightclubs, concerts, and plays, whether on Broadway or off, political or pure entertainment. Now Ray seemed to take up permanent residence at the Village Vanguard, the bohemian basement club, where a troupe called the Revuers dished up the ne plus ultra in topical cabaret. The up-and-comers included the witty song-and-dance duo Betty Comden and Adolph Green, poker-faced comic Al Hammer, the versatilists John Frank and Julian Claman, and a deft blond comedienne named Judith Tuvim, who stopped the show belting out torch songs dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Young Leonard Bernstein was often to be seen pounding the piano.
Freed of marriage, Ray resumed his easy conquests of women in the late summer and fall. Alcohol was one escape from his domestic obligations; his many brief sexual relationships were another—a form of addiction and distraction in New York as well as later in Hollywood. With his blend of sweetness and vulnerability wrapped in a charismatic macho façade, not to mention his lasting power at parties, Ray fell into bed with numerous women with minimal effort. “What kind of person do you think a man wants?” Natalie Wood asks James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. “A man who can be gentle and sweet, like you are . . . Strong.” By the late 1950s, Ray boasted in a letter, he’d made his “march thru hundreds of women.”
One of the “hundreds” said to have gone to bed with him more than once during this period was the actress and torch singer Libby Holman. Holman had been tarnished by scandal in 1932 after being indicted for the shooting death of her husband; though the charges were dropped, her career never really recovered. Ray had an undeniable affinity for broken or wounded people like Holman—like himself. Older than Ray, Holman was also bisexual, like some of his lovers, and nonchalant, like certain others.
Sometimes, the intensity of Ray’s infatuations with people seemed to vary in reverse proportion to their availability, friends thought. For a while Ray pursued Judy Tuvim, who would change her name in Hollywood and become famous as Judy Holliday. They had a mutual pal in John Houseman, whom Ray knew from the Federal Theatre (Tuvim had been a mere switchboard operator in Houseman and Orson Welles’s legendary Mercury Theatre). But Tuvim recognized Ray’s reckless ways, and she was wary enough to try to keep a platonic distance from him.
Ray was as much friend as lover to many women, and a staunch friend to many of the musicians who were part of the Almanac House scene. It might be said that Ray tried harder to help Lead Belly stop drinking than he tried on his own behalf. Though himself in need of a paying job, he arranged or staged countless gigs for his musician friends in the early 1940s, regardless of compensation. Even Woody Guthrie, a dedicated drinker and womanizer himself, held no grudge over his rift with Ray, and the two became chummy again once Woody was back in New York.
When Max Gordon, owner of the Village Vanguard, told Ray that the Revuers had been lured uptown to more lucrative engagements and asked if he knew of a replacement act, Ray returned to the notion—problematic on radio—of teaming Lead Belly and Josh White. Together, he told Gordon, the gritty bluesman and the silkier one would comprise “the greatest folksinging act in the country.” Gordon was dubious but agreed to let the duo rehearse on his small stage.
One afternoon, Lead Belly and White showed up at the club with their instruments, and Ray talked the pair through a playlist, complete with some banter he had scribbled down. Gordon placed a bottle of rye on a table, said not
hing, just watched and listened. Nobody paid much attention to him anyway until the liquid refreshment ran out. Then Ray and the musician duo asked for another bottle. One week and some twenty bottles of rehearsal later, Ray said they were ready.
All the giants of the idiom showed up on opening night in late November 1941: Guthrie and the rest of the Almanac Singers and Burl Ives and other folk-song luminaries, all craning their necks and cradling their guitars. It was a triumphant night for Lead Belly and White. Though Ray hadn’t quite managed to get them to meld their styles, they were nonetheless effective singing solos or trading verses.* Their six-month run at the Vanguard was a high point of folk music history.
Ray would score a similar success a short time later when he paired White with Libby Holman. The duo was Holman’s idea, not Ray’s; he and White were both skeptical when Holman first mentioned it to Ray. “White believed that white women could not sing black songs; they couldn’t even understand them,” biographer Jon Bradshaw wrote in Dreams That Money Can Buy: The Tragic Life of Libby Holman. “Ray, although he admired Libby’s voice, didn’t like it personally. She displayed, even flaunted, certain vocal affectations that although perfect for torch songs, were not compatible with the blues.”
Holman waved off Ray’s doubts, however, and soon he arranged for his sometime girlfriend and White to meet. The two clicked, and would go on to create a road show performing “Early American Blues and Other Songs,” attracting attention—and controversy—as one of the first interracial musical teams ever to play large public concerts across America.
Although Lead Belly and Josh White both benefited from his advice, Ray seemed adrift in his own career. What he did for others he did regardless of any potential for money or self-aggrandizement. Throughout life he was always generous with time and money, even when he had little to spare. If Ray had a bold plan for his own future, he didn’t shout it from the rooftops. He did show around various stories he was writing, for this or that vague purpose, but they would come to naught. Meanwhile he scraped by, borrowing small sums of money from Alan Lomax, who was increasingly vexed when Ray stalled his promised repayments.
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